In the midst of all this, we workers have very few options to defend ourselves. Historically, the most effective tool has been to simply refuse to make our bosses rich at our own expense. We’ve put down our tools, walked away from the factories, and left the mines. Strikes are nothing new. Work stoppages, lockouts, slowdowns, boycotts, and every other flavor of depriving the bosses of profits have historically been the bedrock of workers’ rights. Why do these efforts work? Because we are stronger together than they are. Alone, we’re weak: subject to harassment, firing, eviction, jail. But the bosses can’t jail us all, and without us they can’t run the machines that make them rich. If we want to get results, we have to make sure that when we strike, no one breaks the line. Strikes are as effective as they are unified.

There’s a reason the bosses paid their cronies in the government to make solidarity strikes illegal. There is nothing they can do in the face of united opposition. When one workplace puts down its tools, the bosses groan. When all the workplaces of a single company refuse to work, the bosses tremble. And when all workers in all sectors of the economy proclaim as one “No more!” the bosses scream in mortal terror. 

The second a single strike begins, the bosses start to sweat. They know they cannot survive without a constant stream of profit — without our labor to provide them goods and services to sell, and without our consumption to realize those profits. They employ all manner of tactics to put an end to our united front. They hire scabs. They abuse the legal system. They call the cops. They cancel healthcare. They sic their hired guns on us, beat us, shoot at us, even drop bombs on us. But as of late, their strikebreaking weapon of choice has been the media. At the mere whisper of a strike, they get to work crafting a narrative designed to drive resentment. “See these selfish workers? How they refuse to compromise? How their actions deprive you — the poor consumer — of the goods and services you so desperately deserve?”

It’s all nonsense. It’s the bosses who deprive us. Their avarice drives them to extract as much profit as possible from every drop of sweat off the workers’ brow. They squeeze the working class on both ends: production and consumption. As workers, we face low pay, harsh work conditions, and scant time off. As consumers, we face soaring prices, shoddier products, and manufactured scarcity. These twin struggles are one and the same: capitalist greed at our expense. Try as they might to separate labor disputes from the bulk of “the working class” who need the services our fellow workers provide, it is a fool’s errand. We are all the working class. We are rail workers, teachers, baristas, researchers, nurses, harvesters, artists, hospitality workers, steelworkers, caregivers, builders, writers, and more. We deserve dignity, respect, health, stability, and all the wealth we are due.

It is not just our duty to stand with striking workers. It is our right. Solidarity is the ethos of the working class: to stand together, regardless of the identity of your fellows, so long as you are all people who work. Solidarity is the basic tool by which we wring concessions from the bosses. Every successful strike strengthens us all. We shoulder whatever pain may come from this, we blame the bosses, and we make each other whole. This is what it means to be working class. This is solidarity.

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.

As conditions for working and poor people have  stagnated and degraded throughout the territorial U.S. Empire, a rising tide of class consciousness has spread throughout the working classes. The long-delayed struggle to raise the federal minimum wage has polarized the divided strata of the working classes; the turn-coat labor aristocracy, those for whom the conditions are already “good enough,” have abandoned the common workers and allied themselves with the capitalist bosses in belittling the struggle for livable working-class incomes.  (“Why should you make $60k a year flipping burgers, when I do so and so?”). All over the country, the brutal conditions suffered by workers, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been exposed and brought to light: the momentous increase in Amazon’s infrastructure, the proliferation of snooping Ring-camera technology to monitor package deliveries, the mass social murder of workers by exposing them over and over to the COVID threat, and on and on. These legitimate grievances have fueled the resurgence of  a growing labor movement, and instilled in large sections of the U.S. proletariat a trade-union consciousness that spurs the organization of laborers into new union formations,  through which they can confront their bosses — and not only confront them, but confront them and win.

We’ve seen this trend in Amazon warehouses and Starbucks storefronts across the country. It should come as no surprise that the labor movement within the U.S. Empire, the political and economic center of world-imperialism, would first rise in the unorganized service industries that support the lifestyle of the labor aristocracy. For nearly one hundred years, the capitalist masters of the U.S. Empire have staved off revolution by doling out handfuls of scraps to the working classes. Fast coffee and speedy delivery of any commodity imaginable is the price the monopoly capitalists pay the suburban labor aristocrats and small-business owners haunting the colonial-estate suburbs of the imperialist metropole in exchange for their loyalty. The adherence of all those doctors, well paid tech workers, and small-business tyrants to the parties of the big capitalists has its costs.

This trend has entered Connecticut through Starbucks, calling Starbucks workers across the state to take action and get organized. Connecticut has long been a preserve of the ruling elite. New England boarding schools train the children of the ruling class. New England colleges like Yale prepare them for the management of the imperialist system. The state is the seat of the eastern seaboard’s defense contractors. The financial hub of New York is a mere two hours away and the protected, walled gardens of its monopolist elite can be found all along the southern Connecticut coast — comfortably far from the “danger” of the urbanized city where the finance market sits.

In Connecticut, the trade-union consciousness has surfaced most intensely through the union drive at two Starbucks stores — one in Corbin’s Corner, West Hartford, and the other in Vernon. These stores voted to unionize over the last six months and now stand as the  latest outposts of a campaign for Starbucks unionizations sweeping the country. While the Corbin’s Corner store has not yet seen aggressive intensifications of class conflict (to our knowledge), the Vernon store has been subject to the worst kinds of retaliation — unjust firings, refusal to bargain, and other anti-union tactics.

Generally, across all Starbucks stores in the U.S. Empire, the returning CEO Howard Schultz has waged what’s been called a “scorched earth” anti-union campaign. More than 325 unfair labor complaints have been filed against Starbucks since the first drive began. These complaints include one-on-one meetings between managers and workers to threaten them, captive-audience meetings with entire stores to give them anti-union rhetoric, and the roll-out of added benefits only in non-union stores. These are classic anti-union tactics that our forebears in the labor movement fought and bled to expose and defeat.

Here in Vernon, a local union leader was fired under the ginned-up pretense that a safe had been discovered unlocked during her shift. No money was stolen and no evidence presented that the union organizer in question was at fault, but she was summarily fired and given no opportunity to contest management’s decision. This kind of immediate firing using suspicious or outright fabricated reasons isn’t uncommon in non-union workplaces; managers, acting to protect the interests of the firm’s owners and shareholders, have near-dictatorial power over the workplace, and are encouraged by the capitalist bosses to fire “unruly” workers at will. In this case, the union organizer’s co-workers immediately suspected that she had been fired in retaliation for union organizing — which, even in the fascist U.S. Empire, is nominally illegal, if it can be proved — and have set up a Go-Fund-Me to help support her while her case is pending before the Connecticut National Labor Relations Board, the adjudicatory body that rules on labor practices on behalf of the capitalist dictatorship. (The semi-official representation of the Vernon Starbucks workers, Twitter account @VernonSBWU, did not respond to a request for comment.) Throughout the U.S. Empire, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and his anti-union mercenaries have summarily and illegally fired over 100 local and regional union leaders in their effort to crush the unionization campaign.

At the Vernon store, management just recently refused to negotiate with the nascent union so long as they used a “hybrid meeting” model, meaning, so long as they insisted on the right of their members to attend the meetings with management using COVID-safe methods like Zoom, in addition to in-person meetings. This is a transparent effort to shut down negotiations between labor and management with red tape justifications, so that Starbucks can throw up its hands, while blaming the organized workers for their “unreasonable” ground rules.

The capitalist class is already scrambling to get ahead of this surge in trade-union activity and organization here in Connecticut. Amazon, which over the last two years has engaged in various union-suppression tactics to maintain “order” in their notoriously inhumane warehouses, is giving piecemeal raises to its Connecticut warehouse workers. These raises come just as, over the border in New York, the organizers driving the unionization effort  have fought tooth and nail to organize Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse. This is a desperate retrenchment by Amazon, a pathetic, last-ditch tactic to prevent the “contagion” of trade-union consciousness from reaching Connecticut. But miniscule, last-minute bribes will not placate an outraged employee body that has suffered, for years, some of the most depraved working conditions in the U.S. Empire.

Although the growth of unions and their increasing levels of militance signals the rising consciousness of the workers in these industries, it’s not, in itself, enough to bring about revolutionary change. It is a sign that we are increasingly prepared to become revolutionary, but not the way in which we will fight to win.

Why can’t the unions themselves lead us toward liberation? The fact of the matter is that most of these unions are “captured.” Their leadership serves as little more than puppets of the capitalists. These are the AFL-CIO unions, the AFSCME unions. Like the old revisionist parties of the Western capitalist world, the revolutionary potential of the unions was long ago surrendered to the business interests.

This does not mean we should oppose further unionization. Far from it! But we must be clear: the business unions are given to cowardly capitulation to management, to vile back-room deals with the ruling class, and to opportunist, labor-aristocratic, petit-bourgeois, now-progress, now-reactionary positions. That is, through local organization, the membership of the big unions can be radicalized and those local organizations can be developed into real workplace councils; unless and until it is these final steps are taken, to move from unionization to revolutionary organization, the unions, even those being organized under oppressive capitalist resistance, will remain little more than a foil to be manipulated by the capitalists, to be dangled in front of the workers as a promise of class collaboration.

Unionize! Fight for your unions. But don’t stop there. Push them forward to new heights; bring them deeper into the struggle, even when they don’t want to march forward. The unions are useful only insofar as they serve you to confront the enemy state, only so far as they serve you to stand up to the capitalist and the warmonger, the imperialist and the slick politicians in his pocket. Join your unions and force them to confront reaction — if you’re in a unionized workplace, go into the union and attend meetings. This is a place to advance the front, to win allies, and to do battle with the enemy.

What is a workplace council? It is the self-acting organization of the workers in a given workplace. It is like a union, and a union can easily form the shell of a workplace council. A workplace council is a deliberative body in which everyone who contributes labor to a workplace has a say, has a vote, on what goes on in that workplace; on who “manages” that workplace; ultimately, on whether that workplace continues politely working for capital’s starvation wage, or takes up arms against the rulers. Workplace councils represent workplace democracy in its most refined form. Unions are the crib, the training grounds, of workplace democracy, but it is the workplace council that represents its mature form, a form prepared to assert its demands, to heighten the struggle, and eventually to overthrow the system that made it necessary. Like a union, workplace councils can fight collectively for the rights of their workers. Unlike a union, they are not enslaved to the capitalist system, and are bound by no law. When the time comes, it will be the councils from which our power, the people’s power, springs.

We do not want class peace! We want victory in the class war!