The blurb for this workshop was:

Join us for a teach-in on how to build out winning campaigns to change policy and laws through grassroots power. At this educational event, we will discuss how to go from activism and advocacy to organizing and running campaigns to win lasting change.

In clear terms, this blurb outlined CPUSA’s tactic. It was a baby’s first workshop for those who wanted to exercise their bourgeois-democratic rights of voting, make petitions, and have meetings with elected officials. It promised to teach the most basic skills of doing so, all within a liberal framework of the free competition of ideas. In that sense the ideological content matched the label on the box.

But why would the ostensible Communist Party be engaging in this type of activity of liberal miseducation? And why host it at a white church (a tellingly white church) instead of at one of the numerous Black churches in segregated Peoria?

Because essentially the CPUSA has no interest in uniting the revolutionary masses of the US Empire. CPUSA has all the interest in the world, however, in reproducing its membership of radical-liberals, and securing the greater white networks of support that make that reproduction of the activist-organizer caste possible. In no stage of this process does the leadership have an interest in actually making revolution. Whether this idea of hosting a liberal workshop was stochastically generated by Peoria CPUSA’s own reformist-minded members, or if a directive came down from a higher body, it makes no difference in so far as the results are the same: a counter-revolutionary tactic for a counter-revolutionary strategy wielded by a revisionist and settler-chauvinist organization whose sole purpose is to reproduce the conditions of its own existence.

Political Miseducation

The workshop revealed a lot about the class character of the attendees and of the presenter. With the exception of the author, all attendees were white, with a few visibly queer people, split between the younger cohort (young adults) and the older (around or past retirement age). During introductions, the main concern of the attendees was the fear of the general crisis of American imperialism and the resulting blowback on the domestic front. The desire for some people was a return to “normality” and for others an ascent to a better society. Primarily, the attendees were motivated by subjective factors (moral outrage, political opposition) rather than objective necessity.¹

H. began by highlighting Black Lives Matter and the reform to eliminate money bond as a success of the kind that he intended to convince attendees was primary for political change.² This is of course in line with CPUSA’s social-democratic political outlook — revolution is impossible (or ill-advised), so socialism must be won piecemeal by political struggle encapsulated within the liberal law-and-order rules. Mass mobilization is a tool for these ends.

Our presenter further defined organization as a disciplined craft, as an exercise of collective power. Whose collective power? The power of the “99%” against the “1%”? The Poor vs. The Rich? The power of the white liberal against the white conservative? Why this emphasis on discipline, which is obviously needed for any type of sustained human activity, but no emphasis on scientific class analysis? One of the handouts (a reproduction of a copyrighted worksheet sold by a liberal career-NGO professional) helpfully defined a variety of “roles” one might play within a liberal campaign, proposing that each liberal organizer assort themselves based on one’s own personal talents and passions. Of course, there is no room to discuss the actual efficacy of a “diversity of tactics,” but instead different responsibilities are presented like roleplaying classes that each individual selects like players at a game table. This embodies the voluntaristic, amateur nature of CPUSA and of liberal organizations in general: organizing is something that people do as a hobby because they feel morally compelled to, not because otherwise they will not survive their conditions. When there is no imperative for survival, when the margins for mistakes are large enough, there is no selective pressure to correct mistakes at all.

Our presenter stated that the goal of organizing is to win real material benefits for “the people” (defined in abstract, totally absent of class and other internal contradictions). But what is a victory? A bill reluctantly passed in the Illinois State House of Representatives? Tiny reliefs in funding packages? Again, one only has to look at CPUSA’s line to understand why they push this dead-end incrementalism, which in reality means temporary concessions against a systemic onslaught of deprivation and predation by the bourgeois class, doled out primarily to the white-settler population. Of course, for the settler labor aristocracy and settler petit-bourgeois, it makes sense to struggle within the settler-colonialist system. But for the precariat and the colonized, much less so.

Our presenter claimed that the large, systemic problems of society must be sliced into smaller, winnable issues; that by dealing with smaller issues, one can defeat large problems because society-wide problems are “too big” to conquer outright. He took the example that an attendee volunteered of systemic ableism, cut it down into a problem of inaccessibility for a historic building, then proposed that the organizing solution would be a campaign for funding to renovate the building or zoning law changes to require accessibility. This is the misshapen dialectic of the general and the particular, the abstract and concrete in action utilized for liberal metaphysical practice.

Two strategic interpretations arise from this tactic, neither which are revolutionary models: either the system is “too big,” invincible, and therefore one must carve out spaces of exception via reforms, or by fighting for reforms one can finally defeat enough enemies to get to the Final Boss and then win against the “too big” problem of society. The first reaches the radical zenith of running off into the woods to start a settler-commune in disastrous retreat; the second proposes that Big Ableism (and all of its fellow distinct -isms) lives in a specific office in the White House and must be defeated there. In any case, this model of slicing oppression like a sausage fails to understand that Big Ableism does not exist as a concrete phenomenon, but rather ableism saturates social dynamics in general, as part of the class struggle as a whole. This too repeats for other “axes of oppression” which are always already part of the class struggle.

H.’s primary metaphor utilized for this workshop, to get from an undesirable present state to a desirable future state, is the bridge. To build a bridge requires knowing a source, destination, the conditions of traversal, the resources at hand, and whatever else. In this metaphor, progress is cumulative and linear (though not necessarily sequential; one can build parallel bridges). Each bridge must be constructed via a campaign to unite the “base” through interpersonal relationships, common agreement on sausage-slice issues, and strategic agreement. Of course, the idea of coalition-building and drawing in a number of organizations (of what class character? Again, unanswered) becomes primary here, with the potential base sorted into fixed tiers of “unconnected,” “supportive,” “activist,” and “core” categories (vanguardism with the serial numbers filed off). The same old canard of “diversity of tactics” is repeated. Experimentation is important, yes, but if political struggle is to have a scientific component to it, useless tactics must be discarded and successful ones must be replicated. One cannot permit themselves or others to repeat harmful tactics if they want to win.

Next, our presenter instructed us that communication for a campaign must be done like any other electoral campaign, with pitches and volunteers and donations, etc. What is interesting is that throughout the presentation, the enemy is unspoken, and only given concrete form as targets of isolated issues, never to the level of implicating the whole system of liberal democracy and its underlying imperialism and settler-colonialism unto itself. This can be partially chalked up to the requirement of a “non-partisan” workshop, but the silence on the general class struggle in society is deafening. Again, for a so-called Communist Party workshop!

The final apparatus that our presenter wished to impart on the class was the concept of a campaign lifecycle (a variant of this model) and self-critique. Not “self-critique” in those words obviously, and certainly not to critique individuals for the purposes of ideological development or to escape the entire paradigm of liberal organizing itself, but rather as a checklist to improve upon liberal organizing and to propagate electoralism into the infinite future. The phases of the campaign lifecycle may well be effective in guiding our liberal reformists in spinning their wheels into the mud as each successful campaign is rolled back by their fascist brethren. As for Communists, we desire real advancement.

Before the Q&A section, our presenter advised us on further reading: March by John Lewis (who is the archetypical representative of nonviolence); No Shortcuts by Jane Mallery (who proposes the united front of social progressives and settler-unions); Let This Radicalize You (towards left-populism and left-eclecticism) by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba; and Roots to Power by Lee Staples (who spouts even more left-populism and left-eclecticism)… Nevermind any scientific socialist texts!

During the Q&A itself, our presenter fielded a question about environmentalism and possible stakeholders adequately. Then one of the attendees asked how unions, if they were forbidden to strike by law, could have any actual leverage on politics. This was dismissed as an “out of scope” issue. Yours truly asked about examples of past successful campaigns and current ongoing ones by CPUSA, but was told that this was a “non-partisan” workshop and to speak with the presenter after class.

All in all, what a strangely liberal class for the Communist Party to put on! That is, if you take the Communist Party at their word, which we shall not, and examine only the workshop and not the situation in which it was placed, which we shall do now.

Class and Nationality in Peoria

Originating from the onset of European colonization, the settler-colonial political economy of the US Empire generates and maintains a specific settler consciousness for the white population: a sense of liberal humanitarianism and universalism, of free speech and debate of ideas, and of the civilizational battle for democracy against undemocratic (“barbaric”) forces, be they Native American, the descendants of enslaved Africans, Palestinian, or Russian. In the practical sense, this means that white people and their thoughts are quite literally valued more than the colonized peoples and their thoughts, in both the economic sense and political-economic sense. Settlerism, whose social basis (those who are racialized as “white”) has increased over time and which also admits individual nonwhites on a case-by-case basis, creates the bourgeoisfied proletariat (labor aristocracy) and petit-bourgeois,³ whose mobilization is much more politically impactful and legitimated by the extant bourgeois-democratic order than the mobilization of the colonized proletariat and the precarious white proletariat.

Peoria, due to historic redlining and ongoing national oppression, still remains one of the most segregated cities in the Midwest. The Joint Commission on Racial Justice and Equity of Peoria County maintains its own set of arcGIS map data and comprehensive tables for the purposes of assessing national oppression, as well as comprehensive statistics assessing the prospects of different racial groups in Peoria County. Informal apartheid is reflected in the income gap between white and Black households (and other statistics related to pollution, employment, etc.), and in the political organizations that populate the area. Further complicating this picture is the high population of bourgeoisified proletariat and petit-bourgeois in the city of Peoria, such that in 2024 a combined 33.7%of the workforce earned more than $100,000 per year and 66.0% earned more than $90,000 per year⁴ with an average home ownership rate of 57.5%; these are all statistics inflected by national oppression, at the county-level the average white household earns $63,100 annually compared to $30,400 for Black households.⁵

Owing to this demographic composition, Peoria is politically quiet with a handful of left-liberal organizations compared to a college town such as Bloomington-Normal or Urbana-Champaign. CPUSA, the Democrat Party’s 50501, the Green Party, as well as local single-issue formations and the recent addition of the crypto-Trotskyite Workers Strike Back organization occupy organizing spaces. All these exist with heavy overlap, sorted more into personality-based cliques and aesthetically sectarian friend groups than representing any substantial political disagreement. So are the activist NGOs in Peoria present: including but not limited to Peoria Proud, ACLU, League of Women Voters, and, of course, the Unitarian Universalists (UUes).

These organizations are mostly white organizations, in so far as they are dominated by white people, hold settler consciousness, and a faith in Law and Order. Black organizations such as NAACP, Southside Community United for Change, and the Black churches are also imbued with settler consciousness in so far as the political economy of the NGO as an organizational form plus the concessions of the settler state towards token political representation naturally produces such consciousness, and in so far as religion acts counter to revolutionary consciousness. Yet at the same time, this exists in tension with the national oppression experienced by Black Peoria and is reflected in their practice. SCUC in particular, a conglomeration of neighborhood associations (a liberal version of neighborhood councils) in the deprived Southside area, acts like an informal networking space between those particular organized nationally-oppressed reformists and Black (and other nonwhite) politicians. What distinguishes white from Black organizations is which community they recruit from and mobilize; Black organizations generally have less margin for error and less surplus labor to use up and as such are primarily focused on poverty (and the effects of poverty such as over-policing and incarceration) and intra-community issues, while white organizations have much more room for mistakes to be made and play in the field of “high” politics. Hence the segregation in Peoria remains despite everyone’s liberal best wishes that this ought not be the case.

To examine one white organization of interest: the UUes are a sociopolitical node for a specific kind of white progressive that has left even ostensibly progressive wings of Christianity but has not yet broken with religion entirely. Instead of Christian charity (paternalism), the UUes market themselves as a sort of Social Justice Church, which in practice means charity (paternalism) and reform campaigns. This mostly manifests in the form of encouraging their members to organize in settler-dominated reformist organizations, which perfectly lines up with the content of the workshop. In any case, like with other white churches, when attending their services one does not expect to see a lot of melanin. This makeup was reflected in the actual attendance of the workshop as mentioned before.

Compared to other small churches, which tend to be caught in a kind of money-sink death spiral due to a lack of attendees and therefore tithes, the UUes appear to be doing well. They run regular events for fundraising, they keep up charitable programs, they have a decent proportion of children to adults in the congregation. They are ideological left-liberals dedicated to land acknowledgements and statements of inclusivity and pulling isolated quotes from a variety of faiths in the pursuit of a homogenized liberal-universal spirituality. Committed to participating in protest theatre and nonviolent resistance, in agreement with the hegemonic imperialist logic of civilized democracies and uncivilized autocracies, in the end, they serve as release valves for white guilt and to redirect anti-hegemonic questioning into a reinforcement of the very same liberal political economy that has brought the world to this general crisis of imperialism. None of this is out of the ordinary for settler consciousness.

Revisionist Reproduction

So why would an ostensibly Communist organization host a reformist (liberal at worse, social democratic at best) workshop on organizing at the UUes, implicitly targeting that congregation for attendees? What value does Peoria CPUSA get out of trying to recruit these particular people into the habit of creating and leading reformist campaigns, and of eventually recruiting morally-outraged left-liberal bourgeoisfied proletariat and petit-bourgeois into their ranks?

Very simply put, Peoria CPUSA, whose founding members were originally the Peoria DSA chapter (DSA being another left-settler electoralist organization), is made of the same stuff as the UUes are, has an understanding with them and with the other liberal progressive organizations, and represents the CPUSA as a whole. Worse than any honest liberal formation which at least does not lie to your face about what it is, CPUSA proclaims itself to be Communist while eviscerating Communism of its revolutionary content. They strip all which distinguished Communism from the ideology of the social-imperialists of the Second Internationale — the class-collaborationists who welcomed the advance of fascism in their own countries against Communists, who sought to maintain the grip of their imperialist countries on their colonies within and without, whose mass base was the parasitic labor aristocracy they defended zealously. Worse than any honest social-democratic party which would at least proclaim itself proudly to follow this hoary tradition, the CPUSA offers the illusion of changing course through hypothetical line struggle, which would be productive in any well-formed Communist organization.

But the hypothetical remains unfulfilled. In reality, CPUSA is an anti-democratic organization which ruthlessly purges any genuinely revolutionary tendencies, such as in the case of the 2024 National Convention and the liquidation of the Austin chapter thereafter in order to maintain a reformist theory and practice. In their theory, the revolution must be carried out within the framework of bourgeois democracy, and the current crisis of imperialism must be soothed by the united front of labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settlers to win more pieces of the imperial super-profit loot, and to win accommodations and assimilation for the nationally-oppressed and gender-oppressed into imperialism.⁶ In their practice, it means forever delaying and sabotaging revolution in favor of reforms, suppressing genuinely revolutionary impulses from their own membership, and in general shamelessly fulfilling a counter-revolutionary purpose on behalf of the bourgeois.

Through this investigation, we understand what Peoria CPUSA is doing as a reflection of their national organization and as a reflection of their environment. Their goal is to reproduce their own membership drawn from the “middle class,” to gain enough influence to successfully claim piecemeal reforms locally, and to morally justify to themselves that they are building revolution in the meantime. Once we know these facts, we understand that the central conception of building “collective power” is not meant to be taken in the abstract. It means, concretely, building the collective power of the labor-aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settler left, of re-legitimizing bourgeois democracy by winning small concessions as to stave off the desire for the whole pot of revolution in all of its total destruction of old social relations and forms and therefore the total destruction of US imperialism and settler-colonialism. We understand why CPUSA as a whole supports the Democrats: because they are ideological allies and dedicated partners who benefit from the arrangement — not because the left-bourgeois can be understood in any way to be the “lesser evil.”

1. For the queer white people, this factor is more wiggly in so far as the current bourgeois regime embarks on an exterminationist campaign against them; but, of course, whiteness gives one more room in the first place. ︎
2. Every year since the passing of the SAFE-T Act, held up as the golden standard of reform-oriented organizing by this club of CPUSA, there has been a concerted effort to gut and reverse the reform. ︎
3. Admittedly, the categories are blurry as labor aristocrats are often specialized laborers with the capital to become petit-bourgeois; by the same token petit-bourgeois often obtain labor aristocratic jobs when the going gets tough; this is a fact captured in the liberal “middle class” term. ︎
4. These figures was reached by grouping together all workers in an industry earning over $90k and $100k respectively, based off of their median yearly wages, dividing that by the total number of people in the workforce, then multiplied by 100 to get the percentages. ︎
5. Hispanic Peorians experience their own dire statistics; the lumping of national groups together however makes this data less useful overall in discussions of national oppression. Hispanic Peoria does have its own set of grassroots organizations, churches, and charities which serve the community. A discussion of the prospects of Hispanic, especially immigrant-based, organizations is out of scope of this article. But generally the same contradiction between the legal reformist framework and the realities of class and national oppression are present as in Black organizations. ︎
6. Gender oppression referring to both women’s oppression and the oppression of queer and trans people. ︎

WHAT IS A PIG?
A low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of the people; a creature that bites the hand that feeds it; a foul depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack.

On May 2nd, Rodney Hinton got into his car, struck a sheriff’s deputy, and killed him. This hits our moment like a body through a windshield. At Rodney’s first court hearing, cops filled the room to sneer at the man who had delivered such a monumental blow. The courtroom was a reverse slaughterhouse, pigs lined up to butcher the man.  Rodney walked by without flinching. He wore the wounds on his head from the windshield glass like a crown. 

We celebrate Rodney’s corrective and instructive action. The father of a murdered son has rejected the idea that the murderers stand above us, untouchable, and has dragged them down squealing from on high back into the dirt where they keep the rest of us. Here they become recognizable as an enemy we can fight. Here, at eye level, it is clear just how vulnerable they are.

There is a war raging in this country, and it has been raging for centuries. The current form of the police are the armed-to-the-teeth descendants of the slave catchers and “Indian” killers. Killing children is what cops do. If the dead pig Rodney hit didn’t, he trained the pig who did; they chugged beers over barbecue. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” only works if all the world shares the same vision. What we have are eyes glaring across established lines on a battlefield. When an enemy takes something from you, you better at least take as much back so the fight becomes winnable again. We celebrate this radical act of resistance, the same way we celebrated the eradication of every Nazi from Soviet soil, the triumph of the Vietnamese army over the U.S. imperialists, and the repulsion and humiliation of IOF ground troops by Palestinian freedom fighters. Each casualty of the enemy mortifies and terrifies them, because they only know how to wage a one-sided war. They don’t have the stomach for a real fight.

The pigs who filled the courtroom of Rodney’s first hearing and all the others who wear their uniform on this land feel this. The beasts huddle together, licking their wounds, offering themselves reassurances and prayers. They fear what it will mean if they don’t successfully crush Rodney for his defiance. They will continue to try to hide their vulnerability behind inflated budgets and military-grade equipment. They will mask their fear as rage and strike back on the oppressed with even greater fury. This is a call to everyone invested and sympathetic to the call of justice and liberation, we cannot let the pigs strike Rodney down and make him into a symbol. We must rise for him, demand his release, and fight for it! Celebrate it in the street, let every cop quake  knowing their enemies are everywhere and see them for what they are.

In this country-wide graveyard of the silenced and oppressed, we say, “Let a million Rodney’s bloom!” 

Life for unsheltered people is deliberately enforced hell. Private property rights criminalize their existence in virtually every space. Recent waves of anti-homeless statutes have criminalized homelessness across entire municipalities. When homelessness is criminalized everywhere, the only place left for unsheltered people to go is jail. The Supreme Court of the United States not only recognizes but approves of this state of affairs. This summer, the Court affirmed laws which criminalized sleeping in public spaces. Saddling the unsheltered with fines and criminal records will of course make it harder for an unhoused person to secure housing, but overt fascism can give no breathing room for these basic considerations. The pipeline from unemployment to jail is streamlined like never before.

What’s more, rampant criminalization gives license to those who would commit violence against unhoused people. Criminalization breeds dehumanization. In 2019, Randy Santos murdered four unsheltered people with a pipe as they slept in doorways and sidewalks in New York City. This is a process of dehumanization that comes directly from the bourgeois state. State governments encourage petit-bourgeois residents to see the unsheltered as something other, creatures to be feared, rather than people to be helped.

Unhoused people often shelter on public transportation. This is what Margaret, Simeon, Adrian, and the other elderly person were doing last Sunday night when they boarded Chicago’s Blue Line, one of only two lines that run 24 hours. They bothered no one as they slept peacefully on the dusty train seats. Surveillance footage shows a masked individual executing all four at point blank range shortly before 5:30 AM. They were shot as the train rolled into the Forest Park, Illinois terminal. Margaret was shot in the head and killed instantly. Simeon and the unnamed person died of multiple gunshots. Adrian, who was shot in the abdomen, was rushed to a hospital but did not survive. Police have charged Rhianni Davis, a 30 year old Chicago resident who previously worked as a security guard, with the murders. He was arrested the same morning on another train with a 9mm Glock 43. Investigators claim Davis is a forensic match to the six shell casings found at the scene. There is no established motive. 

Capitalism requires the constant generation of a relative surplus population to sustain the law of supply and demand of labor. Homelessness is not a crisis in America, it is a permanent and obligatory byproduct of our economic system. The number of unsheltered spikes during economic recessions. Regularly occurring economic crises are another absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. These crises become more disastrous in tandem with economic development. Capitalist regimes have developed various welfare systems to hamper revolutionary attitudes in times of crisis. Welfare systems are funded with the spoils of imperialist loot taken from oppressed nations, such as the shiploads of oil and natural gas stolen from Iraq and Syria. America’s welfare system has always been a poor cousin to its Western peers, but it faces little pushback from both the labor movement and a collaborationist “communist” party. The recession of 1973-1975 was not treated with the welfare band-aid. Instead, federal housing budgets were slashed, social service agencies were gutted, and the pace of deindustrialization picked up. This led to what is sometimes labeled the modern era of homelessness. Since homelessness has always existed, will always exist, must always exist under capitalism, the defining features of this modern era are increased visibility of the unhoused, abdication of the welfare state facade, and the barbaric labor discipline of anti-homeless laws.

Forest Park Deputy Police Chief Christopher Chin referred to Labor Day’s quadruple homicide as an “isolated incident.” There is nothing isolated about violence and dehumanization of unsheltered people. It all stems from “the bloody legislation against vagabondage” under which the unemployed are “whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labor.” Horrendous attacks like that which occurred last Monday will only increase in occurrence as the empire continues its clay-footed march into fascism. Margaret Miller, Simeon Bihesi, Adrian Collins, and the other gentleman did not deserve to die. It is up to the advanced workers to develop the organizations — with discipline and Marxist-Leninist education — that will defend the unhoused masses from fascist violence. 

These plans were implemented on May 13. Water barricades were placed on Republic, between Liberty and Green Streets, for a six month trial period. In addition to this, fencing was built around a recreation center preventing homeless people from finding shade and shelter. All of this with the supposed purpose of stopping an “open-air drug market” and stopping crime.

But who is defining what ‘crime’ is? How is a church providing for the hungry viewed as “attracting” crime? Why is a child going hungry, in itself, not viewed as a crime when it’s perpetuated by our own government? The answer is that spikes in “crime” are nothing more than code for a rise in poverty and state repression. These have been caused by the worsening economic conditions in Cincinnati and the gentrification of the neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine.

The gentrification of Over-the-Rhine has been an ongoing process catalyzed by the murder of an unarmed Black man named Timothy Thomas in 2001. This was coupled with public outrage from the community in response to yet another murder of a Black person by police. The rebellion gained momentum; boycotts and protests put pressure on the city. The Black United Front and the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement were just a few of the organizations involved in the struggle. To stomp this rebellion and ensure profitable control of the neighborhood, the  privatization of the public planning department in the form of a nonprofit development corporation named 3CDC (Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation) was implemented in 2003.  This process was dubbed “urban revitalization.”   

Dan La Botz summarizes this history as follows in Cincinnati: A Decade Since the Rebellion of 2001 — What Have We Learned, Where Are We Now?: 

Cincinnati exploded in protest and rebellion in April and May of 2001 following the April 7 police killing of 19-year old Timothy Thomas, the fifteenth African American man under the age of 50 to be killed by the police between 1995 and 2001. While several of those killed had drawn guns and shot at or shot civilians or police, others did not have firearms or were killed while in police custody. Thomas, who had committed many misdemeanors and had several warrants for his arrest (but who had no record of violence) was nevertheless chased into an alley, shot and killed by a police officer. Thomas’s mother Angela Leisure showed up at City Hall accompanied by 200 other community members, almost all of them Black, to demand that city and police officials explain why her son had been killed, but police and politicians dealt with her contemptuously.… The Cincinnati rebellion of 2001 was the largest disturbance in the city since the ghetto rebellion of 1967 and the largest in the United States since Los Angeles riots of 1992 which began with the police beating of an African American man named Rodney King.

After the riots, a real estate consultant named John Alschuler based in Washington D.C. was brought in to advise the city of Cincinnati on how to best handle the situation: “Over-the-Rhine has to be restored as a mixed-income neighborhood where poor-, moderate-, and upper-income people all have a future… create a private entity with the capacity to deliver change at Fountain Square and Over-the-Rhine, devote capital to it, and hire the foremost talent in the country to staff it.” 

In 2003, Mayor Luken appointed P&G CEO A.G. Lafley and Federated Department Stores chairman James Zimmerman to “a new private, nonprofit group charged with sparking downtown’s struggling economic development efforts.” This would come to be the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp, otherwise known as 3CDC — a non-profit development corporation dominating what should be controlled by the people. During this time, the nascent 3CDC started sending out “ambassadors of goodwill.” The clear intention was to send out wholesome and cheerful representatives to the community, but in practice they acted as private security guards, enforcing the interests of the organization and its goals. They leveraged state power to “clean up” downtown. Instead of solving the underlying problems behind poverty and crime, they simply sought to kick it somewhere else.

         One of the ambassadors themselves admitted to the reality of their role. “We’re pretty much looked at as security guards who are setting a higher standard,” an ambassador said. They essentially acted as auxiliary police units. Ambassadors would patrol Over-the-Rhine and look in shop windows “for a signal from an employee that everything is fine or something is amiss.” If they spotted an “unruly customer” or potential robbery, they would call the police. Ambassadors dealt with “everything from drug addicts ranting and raving and threatening our customers to a fight breaking out…” said Gary Gabbard, manager of Donato’s on Main St. 10. Small business owners like Gary use what little power they have to be petty tyrants towards the impoverished and call upon auxiliary police units to police communities. Settlers collaborate with the state to act as ambassadors and subjugate marginalized groups. 

St. Francis Seraph — the church that has been frequently providing aid services to the community of Over-the-Rhine — had planned on converting a nearby portion of the church into a shelter through the nonprofit Tender Mercies. A member of the local neighborhood watch and various city officials claimed this would lead to increased crime and that the neighborhood was out of control.

“You can’t put investment dollars in a neighborhood that’s out of control,” said Chris Frutkin, owner of City Center Properties. “That behavior would never happen south of Liberty Street.” 

The lives of people are easily outweighed by numerical investments to Chris and the class of business owners. They’re more than happy to demonize victims of poverty to protect their own profit, and push narratives of crime being “out-of-control.” America’s economic and social system is maintained in part through stigmatization and individualism. It attempts to place any blame solely upon the individual. Poor people are painted with a general image of immorality; stereotyped as lazy, stupid, bad, or as violent criminals. With this falsehood, a person is able to justify walking past another human begging on the street in 100°F heat without a second thought. With this falsehood, members of a community can be lulled into inaction as repressive powers are built to crack down on them as soon as medical bills get too high or the stock market too low.

“We’re hoping that it could be a form of affordable housing with supportive services to get some of these people off the street into decent housing,” said Father Al Hirt, St. Francis Seraph pastor. “The Franciscans would love to see it used that way, more than some boutique hotel or something.”

Unfortunately, according to WCPO, this was not successful: “The nonprofit Tender Mercies had hoped to buy the St. Francis Seraph friary and applied to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency for low-income historic tax credits for the $21 million project. But the housing finance agency’s board declined to fund the project, according to a May 15 news release.”

Furthermore, the barricade has been a “success” for the settlers:

“So far, so good, let’s wait and see,” said Over-the-Rhine Community Council President Kevin Hassey. “I’m encouraged… there are more police in the area, particularly north of Liberty.”

The notion that crime is on the rise and needs to be rectified in the form of more police ultimately benefits the people in power — the landowners, the police, real estate developers. The police enforce their authority for the state, but that authority is not neutral, as their power is used to protect the interests of businesses to ensure profit and subjugation of colonized peoples. The planned barricade is a fascist attack on people who have been labeled by the state as deserving of extreme poverty and violence. Systematic inequalities perpetually enforced by the state are the root causes of homelessness.

This barricade is a manifestation of the police fulfilling their historic role as slave patrols. Increases in visible poverty and the misery it causes are due to capitalism and settler colonialism functioning to keep working and colonized people exploited — the necessary counterpart to the siphoning of wealth created by workers into the pockets of business owners. Over-the-Rhine isn’t the only target. Several neighborhoods in Cincinnati are also the target. Camp Washington is one example. The Camp Washington Urban Revitalization Corporation even got the neighborhood of Camp Washington selected by the Congress for the New Urbanism for a new renovation project that will displace the renters and houseless people in the area for a walkable neighborhood benefiting wealthier clientele. It’s part of a multi-faceted approach to continue the colonization of land in Cincinnati for increased profits. The iron fist of the state and the invisible hand of the “free market” are limbs of the same body of the illegitimate settler republic of the United States of America.

Police don’t prevent crime and don’t serve the people. They exist to protect the people in power. “Urban revitalization” does not benefit communities, but displaces renters and the houseless by increasing the property values of the neighborhood and drawing in a wealthier clientele. Urban revitalization utilizes the police to displace homeless people and victims of poverty so the land can be remade into luxury condos to make a profit and draw in wealthier white residents. This is exactly what happened with the murder of Timothy Thomas by Cincinnati police and this process is continuing before our eyes. It’s manifesting as a police barricade in the very same neighborhood.

Furthermore, 3CDC is continuing its mission of gentrification, better described as urban settler colonialism: Joe Rudemiller, vice president of marketing and communications for 3CDC said, “We’re going to try to replicate what we’ve done south of Liberty… and hopefully that takes care of some of the issues that we’ve been seeing. We are definitely seeing some challenges with safety up here, and that has been a pervasive problem.” This isn’t some past event to lament. Gentrification is a process that is happening RIGHT NOW and perpetuating white supremacy and impoverishment.

Remember that gentrification is not inevitable — stand up against business interests in your neighborhood! Don’t trust the police and real estate developers who seek to control the neighborhood on behalf of the ruling classes. Protect the homeless people in your neighborhood, and find solidarity against the ruling classes which will crush you both to put a penny in their pocket.

Sonya Massey is dead. She was killed on July 6 by the police state, in the form of white supremacist Sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson. Her murder should elicit rage, but you have no reason to protest this time according to Democrats. The pig was immediately disavowed, fired and charged with first degree murder. Just a Bad Apple. The criminal justice system is working exactly as intended for Democrats and everyone else who accepts Black People’s murder as a regular occurrence. 

Benjamin Crump, the celebrity-attorney representing Massey’s family, has already stooped so low as to thank presidential candidate Kamala Harris for a tweet promoting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which failed to pass in 2021. The Act itself is an embarrassing half-measure that would do little to reduce the ever-increasing number of people shot, strangled, or run down by the statesian police. More embarrassing is the fact that Vice-President Harris and her fellow Democrat stooges completely dropped the issue after they failed three years ago. Sonya Massey’s execution was horrific enough to inject some life into the Democratic Party’s decrepit lip service machine. The machine produces words, but it runs on continuous supplies of blood from oppressed communities in the imperial core. Not just any blood tribute will suffice; only the most barbaric case of murder you can imagine will awaken the beast and get its mouthpieces to work their magic.   

Sonya Massey did exactly what the pigs told her to do before they shot her in the face. She called the Police after hearing people outside her home, but responding officers were immediately hostile towards her after it took 3 minutes and 50 seconds for Massey to open the door at 1 in the morning. Out of concern for an unidentified car in Massey’s driveway, police entered her home and demanded identification. Hearing the sound of water approaching boiling temperature, officers directed her to remove the pot which was on the stove. Massey immediately did so and moved to place the pot near the sink. The officer, seemingly afraid of the boiling water, backed away despite the distance between him and Massey as well as the impending kitchen island. Massey’s response to the officer’s behavior was either a joke or a comment of offense towards the officer’s implication she might hurl a hot pot of water across her living room. She said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” We will never know exactly what she meant, because immediately after saying these words Sean Grayson pulled a gun and pointed it at Massey’s head. He told her, “I’ll fucking shoot you in the fucking face” and approached the pot which he supposedly felt could threaten his life at any moment. Terrified, Massey apologized for the comment and tried ducking away from the gun that was now in her face. She could not outrun three bullets. Before the water had cooled, Grayson was making excuses and calling Sonya Massey a “crazy bitch.” The only mistake Sonya Massey made was thinking the pigs were coming to help her that night. Grayson’s mugshot would soon expose skull tattoos on his right arm which resemble the Nazi Totenkopf, or “Dead’s Head.”

Democrat opportunists were quick to gloat the captured moments of savagery as proof of the success of police worn body cameras. Do not let them get away with it! Such ridiculous claims should be met with ridicule and derision. Do not forget that police officers and prosecutors across the empire wanted body cameras for years. It might seem paradoxical, but law enforcement had everything to gain and nothing to lose from their introduction. The police killing of Michael Brown was a perfect opportunity for the pigs and reformers, led by Obama, to reveal their collaborationist nature. While the cameras were pitched as a solution to police violence, they were nothing but the latest iteration of modern police surveillance. We know this to be true because according to the Federal government‘s own studies, body cameras do not make police less violent. Their own studies prove this, along with the continued rise of police killings since their introduction. Body cameras continue to be successful in their intended purpose; prosecuting the poor and surveilling the masses. They are a regular tool in the prosecutor’s office when it comes to gathering evidence against impoverished people, but are rarely used against the police. Cops will deliberately turn off their cameras before an interaction in case they decide to brutalize or shoot anyone. Crucially, the police get first looks at controversial body cams and will restrict the release of footage until they can permeate a false, exonerating narrative into the ether. This is precisely what Illinois State Police did to Sonya Massey. They shot her and lied for over two weeks, describing her death by white supremacist bullets as self-inflicted. Such is the beauty of police reform. 

Be wary! They will not hesitate to use this moment for their own despicable ends. They will trot out some cowardly guidelines on New and Improved hiring practices for police departments across the Empire. They will demand millions of dollars in new funding packages for flashy training programs while the masses continue to sink into deprivation. Grayson will become a Christ figure for cops — given up for the sins of the system so that Democrats can declare it washed clean. They will pat each other on the back for being so transparent, go home to their respective galas, and tell their servants what they want for dinner that night. We need to ruin their party. Let the murder of Sonya Massey anger you. May it flow through your veins, into your arms and legs. She called them for help, they entered her home and shot bullets into her skull. Carry it with you on the bus, at the office, and on the commute home. Steel yourself for the fight ahead, and do not vote for cops. 

This is every night for Maura Todd and the other survivors of the incident in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s a new nightmare, one created by the malfeasance and thirst for profit of the Norfolk Southern Railroad, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Norfolk Southern Corporation. It’s a night any one of us might have, thanks to Norfolk Southern. And, you know what? Their stock is up.

It’s been over a year since the catastrophe: a thirty-eight-car train derailment, due to what Railroad Workers United (RWU) called a “hedge fund initiated operating model” of overwork and cut corners. A disaster made magnitudes worse when the chemicals within certain cars were intentionally set ablaze, unleashing a toxic smoke cloud that could be seen for miles. Residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area were forced to flee under threat of imprisonment, even while they  suffered the immediate effects of contamination.  As is typical with crimes of capitalism, the perpetrators have been let off with a slap on the wrist while the countless victims are left to fend for themselves. 

The victims in this case are truly countless. The contamination of the botched clean-up has spread to sixteen  U.S. States and parts of southern Canada. As a study conducted by researchers for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), the largest network focused on recording precipitation chemistry in the United States, attests: “Observations showed the expected high chloride concentrations, but also unexpectedly high pH (basic) and exceptionally elevated levels of base cations exceeding 99th percentiles versus the historic record.” Base cations are positively charged ions that affect the alkalinity of surface soil, water, etc. Excesses in these and in pH levels will tip the scales of ecosystems and agriculture in ways that are difficult to predict. Although this pollution won’t cause death and destruction in surrounding areas, experts say it will have wide-reaching environmental damage. Basically, in order to avoid the fallout of a small leak, Norfolk Southern’s contractors created a massive plume of poison that rained down on a third of the country. 

RWU released a statement condemning Norfolk Southern. The statement  describes the combination of factors that make such disasters inevitable, such as ever longer and heavier trains, cuts to maintenance workers, limited training with high turnover, and crushingly long hours leading to rampant fatigue — all symptoms of a greater sickness that is the profit motive. 

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also criticized Norfolk Southern for its atrocious handling of the chemical leak. Five of the scattered cars contained vinyl chloride, a substance that is not only carcinogenic, but causes neurological damage, behavioral issues, and permanently alters liver function. Essentially, while the liver and kidneys can process vinyl chloride, the toxic byproducts of the process remain in the body much longer, creating unpredictable harm. However, vinyl chloride has a low exothermic rate – it doesn’t give off much heat. The possibility of that vinyl chloride exploding after the crash was extremely low. The already small chance of an explosive chemical reaction can be mitigated further by the introduction of several different “free radical stabilizers,” the most common of which is 4-tert-butylcatechol. This would have made the small chance of explosion a non-existent one, but by skimping on these simple preventative measures,  Norfolk Southern and its contractors decided to take a serious albeit manageable spill and transform it into an apocalyptic event. 

According to testimony emerging from the NTSB hearings, in the immediate aftermath of the derailment, Norfolk Southern refused to share vital information first responders needed to appropriately address the crisis. They refused to disclose what was in the cars, even while they set them on fire. Norfolk representatives ducked phone calls. They refused multiple alternatives, like the aforementioned free radical stabilizers, or waiting for the train cars to cool. The company even consulted with Oxy Vinyls, the manufacturer of the chemicals in question, and they were told not to vent and burn the vinyl chloride. They ignored the advice, then claimed the call never occurred. By throttling the flow of information, they created a condition of confused panic. Once this was achieved, they presented the “choice” to local responders: vent and burn, or potentially let the cars explode. The East Palestine fire chief said he was given thirteen minutes to decide. 

Capitalists created this crisis because they are motivated by a need for ever-expanding profit, they simply must pursue cutting corners, increasing exploitation, and deregulation. It isn’t a matter of individual greed — it is the necessary dynamic of capitalism. Capitalists then worsened this crisis for the same reason, as they’ve now been accused of enough times for them to issue threats to stop it. As Senator . J.D. Vance asked during a hearing in March: “A lot of people, including me, are wondering: did they do this not because it was necessary, but because it allowed them to move traffic and freight more quickly?” 

This is the reason thousands of people fled their homes, only half of which have been able to return after a year. This is why people’s pets and livestock coughed up blood and died; why peoples’ health worsened and health complications returned; why black clouds filled the sky, made up of the gas used to kill soldiers in WWI, which was then rained back down upon the soil, waterways, crops of a hundred million people. 

Combine the safety board’s criticism with the rail workers’ union statement, that the initial cause of the crash was a “19th-century-style mechanical failure” — an overheated bearing on one of the axles — something that should never occur in the 21st century, except for a callous disregard for public safety, and it is clear that our current political-economic regime is one of systemic arrogance and callousness. They make disaster inevitable because it is in their interest to do so, then they kill the chance of solutions because those suffering the consequences aren’t of their class. 

Officially, Norfolk Southern will have to pay $1 billion as consequence:

• A $600 million settlement in the class-action lawsuit that encompassed 31 individual claims and may likely preclude anyone within 10 miles of the crash from making any future claims.
• $235 million for all past and future clean-up costs.
• $30 million for groundwater and private drinking water monitoring.
• $25 million for a 20-year community health program.
• $15 million for a civic penalty.

Assuming that “affected area” means those in the immediate vicinity of the fallout, and not the sixteen states as well as Southern Canada, this is still a spit in the face of the people of East Palestine. People like Maura Todd, who had won a battle with cancer prior to the derailment, which, in its wake, has returned. Norfolk Southern will pay for Maura’s check-up, if they don’t manage to weasel their way out of that one. Her life-destroying treatment, on the other hand, is her individual responsibility. 

Throughout all of these detestable revelations, Norfolk Southern has maintained its PR campaign. The webpage they set up in damage control, “Norfolk Southern: Making it Right” promises: “We’re staying in East Palestine as long as it takes. As we move forward, we will continue to listen to the community, and we will continue our work to help the area recover and thrive.” Predictably, the true intentions of the capitalists lay beyond their hopeful press releases and social media. At every point in the NTSB investigation into the derailment and vent and burn, Norfolk Southern tried to hide the truth. Hiding records they claimed not to have kept about train car temperatures; ignoring demands for access to locomotive and event records until they could comb and erase all but 20 minutes of footage; even manufacturing evidence of chemical reactions using off-the-shelf vinyl chloride, which Norfolk Southern then demanded NTSB include in the investigation, and circumventing them and trying to pressure government officials — NTSB’s bosses — when investigators refused. The capitalists lied, threatened, and threw tantrums when the state officials didn’t do what they expect them to: heel and roll over. 

Of course, despite facing the public and promising to ensure this sort of tragedy never happens again, Norfolk Southern’s lobbyists and pet politicians have done all they can to ensure all regulations responding to this disaster are gutted or die outright. Politicians who used the derailment to attack Biden for the sake of their polling have forgotten such righteous anger the second their pockets got a bit heavier. The railroad companies closed ranks, the capitalists marshaled all their discipline, and Norfolk and its competitors joined forces to lobby and weaken the incoming railway regulation as much as they could. As executives celebrated the possibility of “real bipartisan change,” their cronies warned in private against “micromanaging” railroads, against “proposals motivate[d] by politics”. “I want a response from Norfolk Southern that we can look back five years from now, ten years from now, [and] we can be proud,” said CEO Alan Shaw to local reporters in January. What Shaw means is, “If we can get away with all of this, we’ll look back with a lot of pride!”  You can practically hear Shaw chuckling when you read this. You can hear the ice in his glass as he laughs over drinks, as he laughs all the way to the bank.

But even if he doesn’t, even if the most far-reaching and robust railroad regulations could, by some miracle, pass, it wouldn’t be enough. If somehow a class movement of railroad workers and East Palestine residents were to organize and rally, and every demand they made was met by policy and then implemented, it wouldn’t ensure this sort of disaster never occurs again. Corporations like Norfolk — all corporations — as we have covered, are motivated by profit, not greed. It’s not human sin that determines the fabric of our society, it’s material reality. Dynamics like these are ensured by material conditions. If one capitalist doesn’t pursue maximum profit by any means they can get away with, they will be outperformed by another capitalist that will. Our kind capitalist gets as a reward their worst nightmare: becoming a worker. Norfolk Southern has failed to meet profit projections for the last year. Within 2023, they had a revenue of $12.2 billion and operating costs of $9.3 billion (of that, the East Palestine expenses account for $1.1 billion, or just under 12%), leaving them with a profit of $2.9 billion dollars for that year, down 41% from the last. Despite this, Norfolk’s stock is rising. This doesn’t indicate the value of the company in any strict sense regarding profitability, but the confidence shareholders have in it, its value as a corporation. 

Where is this confidence coming from? It comes straight from Norfolk Southern’s willingness and ability to crush attempts at regulation, while putting on a nice face for the public.

Even if, by some miracle, laws are passed to protect populations and railroad workers, before such robust regulations could even be implemented, the railroad corporations would yet again pool all their might towards planning its destruction. We have the whole late half of the 20th century to look to for examples. While we should appreciate any regulations that might save lives and reduce suffering in the meantime, real victories can only be won by the organization of the very working masses who toil beneath the black clouds. The only way to ensure disasters like the one in East Palestine don’t happen in the future is for the working masses to win political power, and build a world that acts in the interests of humanity, rather than the profit motive.

Heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. settled its most recent racial discrimination case this May after a federal investigation found systematic refusal to hire at least 60 qualified Black job seekers at the Decatur, Illinois plant between 2018 and 2020. The corporation, which holds $481 million in U.S. government contracts, agreed to pay $800,000 in back wages to the affected workers. 

The company’s history is littered with a pattern of systematic inhumanity. In a 2015, workers from the Aurora, Illinois facility sued the company over anti-Black harassment and discrimination, including white workers making racist “jokes” that referenced lynchings and Planet of the Apes, management punishing Black employees for mistakes made by other workers, and standard working equipment (desks, phones, and computers) denied to the only Black new employee of the quality inspection office. Black workers had brought their complaints to the company, which simply ignored them or targeted them further with retaliation.

A decade earlier, in 2003, two cases were brought to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over racial and sexual harassment at Joliet and Aurora facilities. Racist aggression specifically included white workers and supervisors whistling at Black workers, as one would whistle at a dog. The company refused to take action when made aware of this behavior. When it came to the “constant” sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, Caterpillar not only refused to discipline the aggressors but retaliated by firing women who exposed hostilities.

Two years later, Caterpillar was sued again, this time for their participation in a particularly heinous act of racism, namely, the 2003 murder of Rachel Corrie and several Palestinians during the ethnic cleansing of Rafah. The murderers were “israeli” colonizers, the murder weapon Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer — gifted by the U.S. government to its attack dogs in the Levant. 

This was only one act of imperial violence using the tools built by this billion dollar company. A 2020 report published by Shoal Collective documented proven use of CAT equipment by the zionist occupation during the previous year, including, but not limited to: all 61 invasions of the Gaza strip, 41 demolitions of Palestinian homes, 3 demolitions of water systems, ecocide of at least 3,000 native trees, construction of 8 occupation roadblocks, and at least 2 instances in which the colonial regime destroyed the entire village of Al-Araqib. By February, 2020, the occupation had completely razed the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib a total of 173 times, genocidal destruction no doubt made possible only with the possession of CAT’s 65 ton beast. This is all, of course, only a limited snapshot of the corporation’s complicity in over 75 years of ongoing imperialist genocide.

But the U.S. Empire’s zionist hellspawn is only the inheritor of this cruel tool. The armored ‘dozer first saw use on the other side of the Asian continent, operated by the U.S. troops themselves to destroy Vietnam’s forests and facilitate the infamously bloody invasion. Like today, the military and its corporate contractors weren’t the least bit phased by mass condemnation of their brutality; brutality, life, and dignity, in the logic of capital, do not warrant a second of consideration in the race towards profit. 

Whether it’s destruction of life and land abroad or degradation and abuse of workers at home, Caterpillar’s corporate ethic is a mirror of imperialism. Not satisfied with squeezing the sweat and coin of the people within the U.S., CAT, like other cogs in the monopoly system, hungrily digs its claws into the throats of our kin around the world. That is to say, the mistreatment and vile destruction wrought by one corporation is not an anomaly, it’s the rule. It’s only with clear eyed recognition of our shared enemy that the working and oppressed masses can uproot these poisonous weeds.

Let us be perfectly clear: this tragic loss of life is directly attributable to the brutality inflicted on workers by arch-capitalist Jeff Bezos. For years, Amazon workers have been organizing around the truly inhumane working conditions in warehouses, including harsh temperatures, toxic air quality, insecure heavy machinery, and the notorious “time off task” policy that has led to workers being penalized for using the bathroom. Workers are constantly surveilled, denied breaks, forced to attend “all hands” union-busting meetings, and subject to hazardous working conditions on a regular basis. In fact, a few years ago, there was another case of a worker, Thomas Becker, dying on-site at this very warehouse, after security again refused to call 911 for half an hour. AEDs on site were nonfunctional, and when paramedics finally arrived, they were directed to go through security at the opposite end of the warehouse. Becker was pronounced dead once he finally arrived at the hospital.

These two deaths are but a drop in the bucket among the thousands of annual workplace deaths and millions of workplace injuries in the U.S. alone. The scale of this senseless brutality can hardly be understood by those of us who have become accustomed to the unrelenting abuses of the capitalist system. We might be tempted to shrug it off, and say “these things just happen.” But they don’t just happen. They are the result of deliberate policy decisions, made by those who value profit over everything. When given the option, capitalists put short-term gains over the safety of their workers, the stability of the environment, and the common good of society at large. 

To do anything less — to place the accumulation of capital in any position other than the top priority — is death for the capitalist. Locked as they are in constant competition with other capitalists, every drop of profit must be squeezed from the workers, like trying to wring water from a stone. They must maintain their position in the market at all costs, even the cost of human health. Some even go so far as to hire consultants to appraise the likelihood of workplace accidents, how much the resulting lawsuits and fees will cost them, and compare to the cost of maintaining a safe and dignified workplace. If there is even a penny’s difference between them, they will defer to the tyranny of the market, and consign their workers to death, mutilation, and psychological torment. To the capitalist, unmitigated suffering is simply the cost of doing business.

Every workplace protection we have, as insufficient as they may be, has been a concession wrested from the iron grip of capital by a united, militant working class. Whether enshrined in statute or encoded in union contracts, the health and safety of the worker is never assured under capitalism but for the strength of the working class itself. We have spent centuries at war with our bosses, and as many fights as we have won, we have lost many more. This war — the class war — has real life and death stakes. The ruling class is constantly engaged in an active assault on the lives of the working class, and workplace safety is a key battleground. Each victory on this front has come with a hit to the capitalists’ profits exactly as big as the gain to the workers’ safety. And in the wake of such gains, the reaction from the capitalists has been to immediately mobilize to regain lost ground.

Through the countless measures at their disposal — the media they control, the capitols they occupy, the courts they buy off, the union-busting firms they employ — capitalists have been able to invest immense sums of money into the project of ripping away every worker and environmental protection they can find. In recent decades, taking advantage of the retreat of union militancy, capitalists have steadily stripped away regulations, hollowed out the legal standing of unions, and laundered the otherwise-toxic notion that safety is secondary to economy. The brutalization of workers has only ever expanded in recent years, from the prevalence of workplaces run like prison camps by petty tyrants, to the violent resurgence of child labor. The bosses are winning, precisely because the working class has abandoned militancy and failed to uphold solidarity.

Injustices like the one at MDW2, while all too common under the harsh rule of capital, must never be accepted as inevitable. They are aberrations, assaults on human dignity that cannot be suffered any longer. Our only option is to strike back: to rally our ranks into a united working class army, riposte the capitalist aggressor, and destroy the very system that empowers them to destroy us. As long as the power to set working conditions rests in the hands of capitalists, tragedies like this will continue to rend our communities. How long will we be content to be sacrificed upon the altar of profit?

The place was Chicago, the year 1886, and the ground fertile with revolution. With the Union’s victory in the U.S. Civil War — and the triumph of waged over enslaved labor, of capitalist industrial over slavery-based production — the development of capitalism in the U.S. Empire, long impeded by the backwardness of the Southern plantation economy, at last accelerated toward maturity. The country’s industrial output exploded, and its industrial proletarian workforce, swelled by Black freed persons and waves of migration and settlement from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, dramatically expanded. As U.S. capitalism matured, so did the proletariat mature as a class.

Chicago was then the central hub of the country’s transcontinental railway network. It connected the old U.S. colonial metropoles of the northeast Atlantic coast — New York, Boston, etc. — to the developing settler colonies along the Pacific.

The city had also earned a reputation as America’s larder, thanks to its massive slaughtering yards and meat industry. The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co. was founded by a number of railway firms in 1865. By the 1880s, the Union Yard spread over 375 acres and housed 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle, and 22,000 sheep at any given time. Each year, the Yards slaughtered somewhere on the order of 2 million animals. The horrible noise and the even worse stench were internationally infamous. This abattoir of animal (and, through overwork, exhaustion, and accident, human) flesh was famously cataloged by the socialist journalist and author Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel The Jungle. By the end of the 1860s, the huge meatpacking firms in Chicago had perfected an ice-cooled refrigerator car, designed to transport meat by railway across the country without ruining it.

As the railyards and the stockyards consolidated, Chicago’s burgeoning industrialists were stricken with an unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. In 1880, the U.S. population was 50 million. Between 1880 and 1920, over 20 million Southern, Eastern, and Central European migrants entered the U.S., with smaller numbers arriving from Mexico, China and other east Asian countries, and the Ottoman Empire. In the 1870s alone, 60,000 Europeans flooded into Chicago, reaching a total of 204,859 by 1880. At that point, they were 56% of the workforce. By far, the largest number, 163,482 workers, came from the German Empire. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants lacked any property aside from their personal effects, and came to the U.S. as laborers. In the 1880’s, 40.5% of all residents in Cook County were migrants, and the majority were either first- or second-generation citizens. Well supplied by waves of poor freed persons and migrants, propertyless and desperate for work, and ripe for conversion into an industrial army of proletarians, the capitalists drank, and drank deep.

During the 1880–90 decade, Chicago doubled in size. Large factory complexes cleared land near the stockyards. The coal operators had established their own “company towns” or “planned communities.” Advertised as philanthropic ventures, a sort of “caring capitalism” in which the workers would be well-looked after by their bosses, these were instead planned towns centered on a company-owned mines, to which workers were lured, debt-trapped by a combination of low wages and artificially high costs of living, and effectively imprisoned in an endless cycle of indentured servitude. The Pullman Company, which owned the captive town of Pullman (just outside of Chicago, the rail hub of the Empire) to house the workers who made the Pullman railway cars, would, less than a decade later, cut the low wages of its workers to near-starvation levels. This triggered the infamous Pullman Rail Strike, during which striking workers brought the U.S. Empire’s railways to a halt from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Coal Wars were on the horizon.

Socialists and the Working-Class Movement

We find ourselves at the end of the “long 19th Century,” nine years after the revolutionary upsurge and Great Rail Strike that led to the formation and brutal repression of the proletarian St. Louis Commune. The Long Depression of 1873–1896 was in full swing. The period began with the “Panic of 1873,” which saw the collapse and ruin of one of the U.S. Empire’s largest banks, Jay Cooke and Co., a giant that had financed the Union during the Civil War and the Northern Pacific Railway thereafter, and the shut-down of the New York Stock Exchange for ten days. In the midst of the depression, socialist and anarchist labor agitators had found wide, sympathetic audiences among the increasingly impoverished, still-young U.S. proletariat, and labor mobilization across the country had reached a fever-pitch. Hymns for the martyrs of the defeated Paris and St. Louis Communes, the thousands of socialist workers mass-murdered by reactionary forces, were sung by demonstrators throughout the country. The clarions of socialism and political liberty had issued their call, and the people — the working-poor and oppressed — were answering in the millions.

This labor agitation came, however, with a patina of white-settler chauvinism. For instance, the 1877 “Great Uprising” in San Francisco, led by the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which nearly overturned the government in that city, was at the same time virulently Sinophobic — violently hostile to recent Chinese migrants. The young, immature socialist movement in the U.S. would eventually fail to overcome the racist tendencies that predominated within it, and would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The St. Louis Commune itself had collapsed largely because the white socialists actively chose racist discrimination against their Black fellow workers over solidarity and a fighting alliance against the capitalists.

The Militants of Chicago

Socialist and anarchist veterans of the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the St. Louis Commune moved to Chicago and, along with the existing socialists of the city, opened the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language radical newspaper. Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons’ husband, founded The Alarm in Chicago at around the same time. The Knights of Labor, a non-socialist and fundamentally capitalist-reactionary organization, began agitating in the city in the 1880s as well. Chicago was the industrial heart of the U.S. state, and socialists of all stripes were seeded among its workers and rising from their ranks.

A battle raged inside the U.S. socialist movement, and raged with particular intensity in Chicago, over whether or not the proletariat should organize itself into militias, over whether or not it should be armed. They had all watched in 1871 as the Paris Commune was destroyed. Albert Parsons threatened that “if people try to break up our meetings… they will meet foes worthy of their steel.”

One of those militants was August Vincent Theodore Spies. August left his home of Landeck, Germany in 1872. By the time he landed in New York he was well-read in German history — particularly what he saw as the social heroes of the Protestant Reformation, like Thomas Muntzer. Like many other German immigrants, Spies gravitated toward the capital of Teutonic life in the U.S.: Chicago. He settled in the North Side and began work as an upholsterer. By the end of 1875, when the city’s small band of predominantly German socialists began organizing massive parades demanding bread and work, August had been introduced to the writings of Karl Marx.

He watched as the city’s businessmen formed a militia to defend their stores from the socialist marchers of ‘75. By 1877, the year of the Great Rail Strike, Spies was an avowed Marxist. He met Albert Parsons and the two worked together as union organizers and socialist agitators. When the Rail Strike broke out, it spread to Chicago. On July 25, 1877, strikers gathered to hold meetings; they were attacked by patrolmen. That night, a Burlington switchman was shot dead by the police for the crime of being a striking worker. On July 26, the following day, blue-coated police shot into a crowd of protestors at the viaduct where Halstead Street crossed 16th Street.

The police marched up Halsted Street to the Vorwärts Turner Hall at 12th Street. Inside, the members of a cabinetmaker’s association were discussing the eight-hour-day question with their employers in German. Officers burst through the doors, clambered into the meeting hall, and clubbed cabinetmakers without mercy. Charles Tessman, a twenty-eight-year-old union cabinetmaker, was shot through the brain. Outside, a Chicago police sergeant fired his pistol at bystanders while his men beat cabinetmakers fleeing the hall in terror.

Having witnessed the “Battle of the Viaduct,” many German workers joined the Lehr und Wehr Verein (“Education and Defense Society”), an armed organization of workingmen dedicated to community defense. August Spies was among them. From then on, he adhered absolutely to Marx’s dictum that the proletariat must at all times be prepared for armed conflict with the enemy state and its apparatus of oppression.

In 1881, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld a state law banning the Lehr und Wehr Verein and all other proletarian militias. Parsons and Spies watched as the businessmen’s First Regiment continued to arm itself in public and conduct drills, but the workers’ self-defense groups were banned. The Bill of Rights, Parsons argued, did not protect the socialist; it protected only their sworn enemies. (It is this case, by the by, Presser v. Illinois, in which Herman Presser was fined $10 for belonging to the Lehr und Wehr Verein, which formed the legal basis for all U.S. gun control until it was finally overruled in 2010. A century later, during the 1960’s and 70’s, the Illinois court’s ruling would serve as the legal grounds for the State of California, headed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, to disarm another Communist organization: the Black Panther Party.)

The militants within the Socialist Labor Party took control of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language socialist newspaper with a wide circulation among the organized workers, and hired August Spies as its editor. The militants held a conference in Chicago in 1881 and, tired of tepid trade-unionist reformism and its transitory, merely “paper”  victories, staged a split within the SLP. The splitting faction called their new organization the Revolutionary Socialist Labor Party. Its founding principles urged the formation of communistic trade unions that would forsake the ballot and take up arms. It proclaimed it would lead “armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights.”

Fight for the Eight-Hour Day

In 1886, most U.S. laborers worked 60–70 hours per week. Ten hours a day was the industry standard — and the capitalists wouldn’t accept a minute less from their workers. Indeed, some firms forced their workers to maintain the grueling pace of 12- or 14-hour days for six days a week. The rallying cry of the U.S. socialist movement was the reduction of the working day to 8 hours, the working week to 40 hours, but with the same, 10-hour pay. The Eight Hour League had begun the long and bloody campaign to realize this demand in the 1860s, but had failed to secure real reforms. Although the State of Illinois passed an eight-hour law under pressure from organized labor and socialist organizations in 1866, which went into effect on May 1, 1867, the employers categorically refused to honor it, and the State refused to enforce it. The capitalists claimed this infringed on their “freedom of contract,” and demanded the right to “freely contract” for longer hours. Through this “freedom of contract” “loophole,” the capitalist courts saw to it that the law was reduced to a mere cipher. No firm would hire those who refused the longer hours, and the workers were forced to accept employment on the capitalists’ terms. The reforms therefore represented only a paper victory for organized labor, and an inconvenience for the capitalists that was overcome with the stroke of a pen.

Chicago, the heart of the labor movement at that time, erupted into spontaneous marches and protests. The capitalists deployed the police to club them into submission. The eight-hour movement was devastated.

In October of 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, led by Marxists and other revolutionary socialists, set May 1, 1886, as the day by which the eight-hour work day would become the standard — whether the bosses agreed or not. This time, things would be done correctly; the victory would come not from a capitalist-owned state government, but from the organized workers themselves. All across the U.S., marches would be coordinated; there would be no spontaneous protests exposed to the batons of the urban cohorts of the capitalist police and National Guard. The U.S. labor unions began to prepare. The Arbeiter-Zeitung demanded the eight-hour day. “Eight hours work, eight hours rest, eight hours for what we will,” was the call.

Strike!

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, nearly half a million workers across the U.S. went on strike. They called it “Emancipation Day.” In Chicago herself, it was estimated that 40,000 workers left their workplaces to march, and twice as many people took to the streets to join them. The city was quiescent. Her vast skyline of smokestacks was nearly still. Factory power plants were silent, the coal slumbering peacefully in its stalls or barrels. Steamships rode at anchor, unable to take on supplies.

The workers were on strike — and not only in Chicago. All over the country, workers marched in solidarity. In New York City, they were on strike. In Detroit and in Milwaukee, they were on strike. The machines stopped whirring. The looms waited. In factories and plants all over the republic, the productive forces of Capital were frozen. The spindles and lathes, scythes and scissors, hammers and presses, that day-in and day-out had produced a continuous rattle, and continuous clink of coin for their capitalist owners, and a continuous exhaustion for their worker-operators, were now gathering dust where they stood. They were wasting away, and so was the potential for profits they contained, useless without the workers to set them into motion. If you listened closely, you could just about hear the soft sizzle of money burning.

But not at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Plant in Chicago. The Reaper Works was not idle. Its 360 foot, four-story brick face was alive with motion. The nine-room woodworking department was filled with sound. The nine-thousand square-foot blacksmith shop thundered with the labor of hammers. The foundries and the engine house: thumping away at their tasks.

Cyrus McCormick, Jr., president of the McCormick Harvester Company, was not about to be cheated out of his day’s profit by any socialist balderdash. No, he would keep his factory open while all the rest were luxuriating in the cool May air. And how? Cyrus McCormick had hired scabs. This came as no surprise, since McCormick had hired Pinkerton agency mercenaries in 1885 to beat trade unionists demonstrating in Chicago’s downtown streets.

In fact, at the Reaper Works there was a labor dispute still bubbling over from earlier in the year. After locking out striking molders, plant managers had sought replacements all over the midwest and issued revolvers to 82 loyal employees. They built kitchens to serve the 400 Chicago police sent to protect strikebreakers. Cyrus McCormick was ready on May 1, because he had been fighting this battle since April. As the rest of Chicago held its breath, the armed battalions at the McCormick Harvester Company simply went about another day, prepared to see the crowds gathered by the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the discharged unionized workforce howling on the street just outside the compound.

Nevertheless, fully half of McCormick’s scabs defected to the strike, leaving their posts in the works. The strike at McCormick, begun as an isolated dispute over pay, ran right up into the general strike of Emancipation Day. As the whole city, the whole country, joined the strike, even the McCormick strikebreakers left their posts. Management, now desperate, promised an eight-hour day to the strikebreakers if they returned. They made no concessions to the locked-out strikers.

By Monday, May 3, many of Chicago’s employers, reeling from a few days’ lost profits, started to cave. The breweries agreed to employ only union members, limit Sunday work to three hours, and set five break periods each day. The pork and beef packers agreed to the demand to cut the working-day from ten to eight hours, but with the same day’s pay. 

In the morning, August Spies rushed to his printing office to put together a special strike edition of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He rushed all over the city to speak to strikers. In the early afternoon, a Czech-migrant lumber leader asked him to come down to the Southwest Side to give a speech, and the obliging Spies rushed there, too. When he got there, the crowd was large but uninterested. Just behind him and down the street stood “Fort McCormick,” the heavily armored and fortified Reaper Works. He was not there to rally the workers at McCormick’s. While he was still speaking, the bells at the works clanged, signaling the end of the strikebreakers’ workday. The McCormick strikers in the crowd wheeled away and surged toward the factory gates. Gunfire cracked and boomed from the heavily defended plant: the police had opened fire on the strikers. 200 armed officers boiled out of the Reaper Works, clubbing strikers with truncheons and shooting them at point blank range with pistols.

Spies escaped and sprinted back to the newspaper offices, where he grabbed handfuls of agitational leaflets before sprinting back into the fray. 

REVENGE! Workingmen, to Arms!!! Your masters sent out their bloodhounds — the police — they killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s this afternoon…. You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have endured the pangs of hunger and want; you have worked yourself to death; your children you have sacrificed to the factory lords…. [the master sends] his bloodhounds out to shoot and kill you! … If you are men, if you are the sons of grand sires who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you. To arms!

Meetings of union workers and socialists were held that night to decide a response. Rather than gather the next day on Market Street, in their usual meeting place (because, as one socialist argued, this would serve as a “mouse trap” if the police attacked), the socialists decided to gather in a larger space — Haymarket Square.

4 May: Haymarket

On May 4, the strikes redoubled. Acts of rebellion erupted across Chicago. A dozen laundry girls employed at the Clifton House Hotel informed their foreman that they’d be running things. When he refused, they quit on the spot. Young women left clothing shops for the eight hour strike; at one shop, strikers removed the belt from an engine, rendering it useless. Ships were prevented from offloading at the queues by lumber shovers who refused to work unless they got their ten-hours’ pay for eight hours of work.

In the Pullman company town, union workers elected a committee to present their demands to Mr. Pullman himself. The delegation was made up of cabinetmakers, tinners, finishers, carpenters, wood turners, car builders, wheelwrights, upholsterers, and common laborers. Pullman, of course, refused to receive the delegation. In response, at 7 p.m. that day, the strike committee met with all 3,000 Pullman employees in the company baseball park, and they voted to strike.

Employers across the city demanded their still-legal shopowners’ militias be deployed against the workers. At noon on the 4th, Colonel E. B. Knox, commander of the First Infantry, was warned of 6,000 strikers in the lumber district. Knox called up the National Guard and armed them. The mob never arrived — the scare was a capitalist fabrication.

The Arbeiter-Zeitung compositor, Adolph Fischer, added the words “Working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force,” to a leaflet calling for the Haymarket meeting, even though the socialist planning committee had not suggested that workers bring guns to the rally at Haymarket. Spies demanded Fischer redraft the leaflet for fear that the words would provoke a police attack.

The rally began in the dark. The street stank of manure and rotting vegetables. A single gaslight on a lamppost guttered over the Haymarket. August Spies began the meeting saying it should be peaceable. For twenty years, he declared, workingmen had asked in vain for two hours less work each day; they’d trusted the “democratic” process, only to be betrayed by legislator “representatives” and treated with contempt by their employers. “I see Mr. Parsons is here,” he said, as Albert made his way through the crowd. “He is a much abler speaker in your tongue than I am, therefore I will conclude by introducing him.” Parsons climbed up on the wagons near Crane’s Alley and looked out on a street that was packed with 3,000 workers.

Parsons reminded the listeners of 1877 and the words of the railroad baron Tom Scott, who said of the striking trainmen in that year: “Give them a rifle diet and see how they like that bread.” He condemned the police for the outrage at the McCormick plant.

After Parsons, Samuel Fielden addressed the crowd. He warned of danger everywhere. He brought his speech to a fiery close, invoking the workers martyred in McCormick’s massacre the day before. “Keep your eye on the law,” he cried. “Throttle it. Kill it. Stop it. Do everything you can to wound it — to impede its progress.”

A storm was blowing up. Albert Parsons suggested adjourning. Fielden said this wasn’t necessary because he was about to conclude. Parsons left anyway, and so did some in the crowd. Even Fischer departed. By 10:20 p.m. only about 500 people remained at the Haymarket. Fielden finished his speech: “The Socialists are not going to declare war; but I tell you, war has been declared upon us; and I ask you to get hold of anything that will help you resist the onslaught of the enemy.”

Murmurs rippled through the gathered workers. Through the gaslight, it was clear that there was a column of blue tunics and brass buttons making its way across the entire width of Desplaines Street toward the Haymarket. George Brown, a Yorkshire-born shoemaker, said that he saw “a great company of police with their revolvers drawn, rushing into the crowd which parted to make way for them.” The police had decided to strike.

Their captain, William Ward, stopped his men. He shouted up to Fielden, “I command you in the name of the people of the State of Illinois to immediately and peaceably disperse.”

From Fielden: “But we are peaceable.” Then, after silence, “All right, we will go.” He started to climb down from the wagon.

There was hissing in the air. A Union navy veteran recognized the thing now passing overhead. He shouted, “Look out. Boys, for God’s sake, there is a shell!” A few men looked up. An orange flash ignited overhead, and the device detonated in the street.

The police reacted, without a second thought, by unloading a hailstorm of bullets. Although officers would later testify that the crowd had thrown the bomb and opened fire on the police, Captain Ward thought the bomb came from behind police lines. Two businessmen who later testified in the criminal trials likewise swore that no one in the crowd fired.

“Goaded by madness,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, “the police were in the condition of mind that permitted no resistance, and in a measure they were as dangerous as any mob of Communists, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between peaceful citizen and Nihilist assassin.” According to witnesses, patrolmen “emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.”

The numbers of workers and of socialist and anarchist leaders killed went uncounted. The capitalist papers didn’t care. We know that the deployed police  killed seven of their fellow officers by friendly fire. We can only guess at what these rabid dogs of the capitalists inflicted on the demonstrating workers and their socialist leaders.

The state reacted to the Haymarket massacre, committed by their own shock troops — with at least seven, according to police reports, and probably far more, workingmen slain by police bullets — by arresting the editorial staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and several associated socialists and anarchists. Chicago city officials were determined from the outset to hang them; they had only to convince a stacked jury. The city coroner’s inquest listed the causes of death of the officers as bomb shrapnel “aided, abetted, and encouraged” by Spies, Parsons, and Fielden. For days, detectives flushed anarchists and Marxists from cellars, conveniently “discovering” caches of weapons and dynamite as they went.

Eight men — socialist and anarchist leaders — stood accused. The trial, Illinois v. Spies et al., started on June 21, 1886, and went on until August 11. The judge was openly hostile to the defendants. No union members or anyone with socialist sympathies was permitted to be seated on the jury. The jury returned eight guilty verdicts. The judge sentenced all but one man to be hanged.

Fielden received a governor’s commutation to a life sentence. One man blew his own face off with a blasting cap in his cell, lingering on for six hours in brutal agony, rather than face the shame of a public hanging. On November 11, 1887, four defendants — Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies — were taken to the gallows. They sang the Marseillaise — a French Republican hymn. As he stood with the noose around his neck, Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

May Day: The International Remembrance

Solidarity with the Haymarket Massacre martyrs poured into Chicago from around the globe. In 1890, the Marxist Second International decreed May 1 “International Workers Day” in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. The 1904 sixth conference of the Second International asked all Social-Democratic parties and all labor unions in all countries to agitate for the eight-hour day on May 1. Today, International Workers Day is celebrated in some form in almost every country on earth.

Since it was established, May Day demonstrations have played a pivotal role in revolutionary history.

Bloody May 1929 marked the high point of Communist labor agitation against the corrupt bourgeois Weimar German republic. The German Communist Party, at the height of its popularity numbering over 350,000 members and millions of supporters, marched in defiance of the Social-Democratic Party government on May 1 in 1929 — and, as at Haymarket nearly fifty years before, the government unleashed its shock-troop police, and ordered them to open fire on unarmed marchers. The reformist, capitalist-captured Social-Democratic Party’s repeated betrayals of the workers caused its base of support to shrink and the socialist movement to become disorganized. The Nazi Party would soon use this instability to its own advantage. After the Nazis swept the German elections in 1933, the Social-Democrats capitulated and accepted fascist rule, leaving the Communists the country’s lone anti-fascist party.

For the international socialist movement, May Day has been a holiday held sacred since that fateful night in 1886. Recognized by all socialist states, it has been the subject of a thousand paeans and celebrations. In the Soviet Union, May Day was a celebration of the triumphs and accomplishments of workers the world over, but particularly those working toward socialist construction.

Our monopoly-capitalist rulers in the U.S. Empire and their loyal servant politicians in its appurtenant state machinery, of course, have done their best to suppress public celebrations and public awareness of the history of May Day in this country. In the U.S. Empire, labor is “celebrated” in September, not in May — an international idiosyncracy meant to keep us from getting any funny ideas about belonging to a global working-class movement! Officials in this country discourage marches, and there are no laws giving laborers the day off, either on May Day or on the U.S.-specific Labor Day in September. Why would there be? Our rulers won’t abide May Day celebrations taking off in the same country where the tradition first took hold; their aim is, and always has been, to force us back to work, from the first May Day until this one.

But the workers of the world know that May 1 is the day of labor’s emancipation. As our movement for Communism within and against the U.S. Constitutional Empire recovers from its nadir, we must all remember the socialist martyrs lost on May 1, 1886. More importantly, we must look ahead. We know, along with all the conscious workers of the world, that the victories of Capital are fleeting, while ours is the grand historical march of emancipation, the inevitable tide of total social revolution. That is what we celebrate. The sacrifices made by the brave socialist martyrs of the past, their deaths at the hands of our oppressors, are the links in the great revolutionary chain, by which we wend our way to the ultimate victory.

The residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and of communities all along the Ohio River basin, for hundreds of miles around, are the latest victims in the war between the working classes and the bosses — in this case, mostly big financier companies like Vanguard Group, Blackrock, and JPMorgan Chase. Although the people and ecosystems of Ohio were exposed to these toxins by the careless greed of Norfolk Southern, this disaster doesn’t have just one father. No, to get to this place, Norfolk Southern has lobbied and bribed its pet politicians, has spent $450,000 on Democratic politicians in just 2022 alone, and spends every year over $1.5 million in lobbying to the Congress. This disaster has been years in the making. Under the administration of President Obama, proposed safety regulations for cars like those being transported by the Norfolk Southern death train were scuttled by Norfolk Southern dollars. Although a train leaking vinyl chloride had derailed in New Jersey in 2012, Obama’s administration took the rail company bribe and let the deadly transport continue.

Under the Trump administration, the rail companies went farther — they pushed the government to withdraw regulations requiring better braking systems on all cars carrying hazardous waste.

The final blow came this last fall and winter when President Biden and the capitalist-controlled Congress helped the rail giants crush a railway worker’s strike. One of the chief demands of that strike was an increase in staffing on the sometimes miles-long cargo trains that the rail companies send cross-country with dangerously slow braking systems (developed in the late 1800s), without proper hazardous waste warnings, and now with chronically and criminally over-tired workers.

They asked for fourteen sick days. They did not receive fourteen sick days. They did not receive twelve sick days. They did not receive ten sick days. They did not even receive the seven sick days that Democrats hastily tacked on to the contract at the last minute. They did not receive five sick days. They did not receive one sick day. The rail workers have received exactly what they started with: no paid sick leave.

This united, capitalist front of Republican and Democratic politicians is directly responsible for the tragedy in East Palestine. President Biden, President Trump, President Obama, and all the cronies and lackeys in Washington are as responsible for the derailment as if they had dropped a phosgene gas bomb directly on the town of East Palestine.

At 8:54 p.m. on 3 February, along main track 1 in East Palestine, Norfolk Southern’s general merchandise freight 32N derailed, jumping 38 cars from the track and causing a fire. The train was hauling 20 hazardous material cars and 11 of those cars derailed. Train 32N was 150 cars long. “The longer the train, the heavier the train, the more wear and tear it puts on the actual rail itself, as well as the equipment,” said Jared Cassity, legislative director for the country’s largest rail union, SMART-Transportation Division. “We’re seeing more wear and tear. We’re seeing more unintended train separations, which is where the train breaks apart.”

How many rail workers do the monopolies put on trains that are 150 cars long? Two. Plus one trainee. For transportation magnates, fewer employees means more profits. Not only that, 32N broke down at least once before derailing in East Palestine according to Norfolk Southern employees. It could happen again. It will happen again.

The National Transportation Safety Board promises a full report in a few weeks, but for now all we know is that the government claimed the fire threatened the pressurized vinyl chloride cars. When subject to fire, a pressurized vinyl chloride car is dangerous to a range of at least a half mile, according to the National Library of Medicine, and the only way to put the fire out is to flood the entire area and cool the containers.

Sittig’s Handbook of Toxic and Hazardous Chemical Carcinogens contains this ominous warning: “The only respirators recommended for firefighting are self-contained breathing apparatuses that have full face-pieces and are operated in a pressure-demand or other positive-pressure mode.”

Since the derailment, thousands of local animals have died, poisoned by the release of the hazardous chemicals. In the few days after 3 February alone, before the controlled release began, 3,500 dead fish were found in local waterways. It is almost certain at this point that, despite government protests to the contrary, the Ohio River has been contaminated.

Andrea Belden was staying with her boyfriend and their two cats at his grandparents’ East Palestine house when the train jumped the tracks. Although they fled immediately when the evacuations were announced, her 2-year old cat Leo fell ill. Leo, who had been given a clean bill of health two weeks prior at his vet appointment, was sent to the emergency vet and Andrea was told that “his heart was enlarged, he had fluid around his heart and in his lungs, [and] his blood pressure was severely low.” The vet told her it was heart disease triggered by vinyl chloride poisoning. When she wrote to Norfolk Southern asking for help to pay the $11,000 and mounting veterinarian bills, she was told that she should file a damaged property claim and might get recompense in weeks or months. She couldn’t afford to continue his treatment. Leo died.

All residents of East Palestine within a 1-mile radius of the crash were evacuated on February 6, the day Mike DeWine and Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro (a Republican and a Democrat, respectively) decided they were going to vent the vinyl chloride cars. Those who refused to depart were arrested by the East Palestine sheriff’s department and taken out of the zone of death. Despite the danger, Governor DeWine and all state and federal officials involved in the crash gave the all-clear signal for the residents to return home a mere two days later, on 8 February.

In the meantime, the all-empire news has been obsessed with something of little or no moment: Chinese-made weather balloons. The media has been plastered with the announcement of a Chinese balloon shot down over the Atlantic, near South Carolina. The People’s Republic informed U.S. officials that it was an off-course civilian balloon, but the Department of Defense has spent the last two weeks blanketing the news media with stories about a worldwide Chinese spy balloon network. Coverage has been focused almost entirely on the “spy balloon” story which, even if it were true, would be a matter of no moment for most of the residents of the U.S. Empire — unlike the poison-cloud released from the Norfolk Southern train in Ohio.

Only in the past few days has the Norfolk Southern death train been publicized to any degree. On February 8, a reporter was arrested at a press conference given by the Ohio governor and charged with criminal trespass; this is the degree to which the U.S. government wants the people of this empire to see the criminal contempt with which the capitalists treat the working classes. It took until February 15 for the state of Ohio to drop the charges against the arrested reporter, even though he was clearly arrested at a press conference merely for doing his job.

Given the disregard with which the organs of the U.S. state, even those that are supposedly “non-political,” like the Center for Disease Control, have treated the COVID crisis, and given the response of the government to legitimate inquiries about the dangers of the spill, it’s not surprising that the residents of East Palestine are asking questions. At a town hall conference on the 15th, many complained that they still felt sick. The Environmental Protection Agency, although certifying that everything is supposedly safe, has warned that residents shouldn’t vacuum for too long (for fear of disturbing particles and throwing them into the air where they’ll be inhaled) and that they should disinfect and clean surfaces continuously. When the residents at the February 15 town hall asked where the representatives of Norfolk Southern were, they were told that none had chosen to attend because they didn’t feel safe.

In the coming days, Norfolk Southern will try to defend itself. Some of what you’ll hear is even true — train derailments do occur at a fairly regular rate in the U.S. (about 1,000 every year), but disasters of this magnitude are rare. The rail monopolies have completely reorganized their operations to cut out the costs of workers since the start of the COVID pandemic. Precision Scheduling Railroading, the cousin of “just in time” inventory management, was developed by the railroad owners to reduce the number of workers per train — at great savings to the monopolists and at great costs to the people living in the U.S. Empire. Trains are now 30% longer, some miles from the engine to the last car. During COVID, the rail industry has fired 30% of its workforce. Conductors and other workers are required to walk miles from car to car, to work on skeleton crews, and to be responsible for increasingly long trains. Those workers are badly paid, given no time off, and are forced to work while sick if they want to keep their jobs.

This is class warfare. Railway workers, traditionally the most well-organized labor sector in the U.S. Empire, have always stood at the forefront of the working class battle for control over production. Who are the most impacted by lax safety standards, out-of-date brakes, and skeleton crews? Railway workers. Who are most impacted by train derailments? Railway workers, followed closely, in the cases of chemical leaks like this one, by the working class people who live near the rail lines themselves. At every step of the way, railway workers warned of something like this and did whatever they could to combat it — to no avail, as the federal government did its job and sided again and again with the railroad monopolies.

The fight against workers for control over profits, for control over industry regulation, for control over their very lives, is intensifying. It’s no wonder that the monopolists are striking some of their hardest blows at the rail industry, which has stood ahead of most other U.S. production in terms of organized labor. Rail workers are class-conscious. They know it takes a walkout of just a few people to paralyze the entire rail system across the whole country. The rail monopolies are only the forefront of the capitalist response to organization among the working classes. As a comparison, for forcing workers to work in unsafe conditions and causing a chemical explosion, the People’s Republic of China sentenced the owner of a chemical firm in Tianjin to a suspended death sentence. Here in the U.S., executives are almost never held accountable. The fact of the matter is, the rail workers don’t need Norfolk Southern. They don’t need the investors that own the monopolies. They don’t need the capitalist “managers.” In fact, management from the capitalists — really, interference from the investors — merely degrades their ability to work, their ability to keep the people of the U.S. safe as they transport the dangerous chemicals required for the many industrial processes across the country. Without the investors, the monopolists, the industrial capitalists, production would be smoother, faster, cleaner, more democratic, and safer.