Hurricane Fiona, making landfall in Puerto Rico on September 18, took lives, shut down the power grid and impeded access to drinking water for the vast majority of people. The island was paralyzed. The media, pundits and politicians blamed the catastrophe on nature. But it was decades of neglect of the basic infrastructure and services for workers that crippled the response to this storm, just as happened when María took thousands of lives five years ago. And it was a willful neglect, advanced technology rendering workers disposable for the sake of profits. This scenario is capitalist logic at work, reason guided by the bottom line.
Today, as climate change precipitated by capitalist exploitation floods, dries, freezes, or scorches whole regions, this same logic finds profit and benefits in natural calamities. The workforce can be replaced and the owners feel safe. But an inhospitable Earth will doom everybody. In this context, revolutionaries need to wed the struggle to safeguard the planet’s environment with the fight for access to natural resources in order to reveal disparities and injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits.”
CAPITALISM’S UNNATURAL DISASTERS
In the last few years, nature has battered Puerto Rico with hurricanes and an earthquake, but these things are a part of life in tropical regions. Capitalism has brought about much more death and destruction since its onslaught five centuries ago with the arrival of Columbus: genocide against the indigenous Taíno people (resurgent through their presence in Puerto Rican genes, culture, and consciousness), the sterilization of a third of Puerto Rican women after World War II and colonial exploitation and oppression of laborers, including slavery and peonage. But Puerto Ricans have had enough.
The current economic crisis has roots in the so-called Great Recession, which hit Puerto Rico’s controlled market and workers earlier – in 2006 – and harder, costing a large portion of the class its livelihood, and forcing out-migration. More recently, Covid-19 infected a third of the population, took over 5,000 lives, and shut down businesses, production and normal life. Owners got another excuse to close unprofitable enterprises, further gut social services and neglect upkeep of the physical infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and day care centers, leaving people more defenseless when future natural catastrophes strike.
The people were already disgusted by the historical racial and gender oppression (today including femicide), the crass greed for wealth and power, the flagrant attacks on people’s rights, the barely disguised corruption of politicians and businesspeople. And of course, by the daily violence, whether “legally” enforced or the illegal terror practiced by the drug trade, itself a capitalist enterprise. All that, capped by the new health and economic crises, brought about a massive exodus of people – workers, managers, professionals and artists – rivaling that of the post-World War II emigración.
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL POLARIZATION GROWS
All this has ignited a growing mass response that has been expressed in several social explosions: the newly arising labor struggle and the women’s, LGBTQ+, Afroboricua (Afro-Puerto Rican), ecological and community movements. In 2016, after the deeply indebted government declared bankruptcy, countless thousands protested the Junta, the “financial board” which capital had put in charge of the economy and basic services essential for life.
They had squeezed employed workers and the jobless majority through cutbacks of services and benefits, and the “middle class” through $72 billion in “public” debt and $55 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. The savings went to big banks, financial firms, hedge funds and private contractors through a corrupt public utilities and municipalities bonds scheme. Finally, in 2019, one and a half million Puerto Ricans took to the streets to oust the corrupt governor, Ricardo Roselló.
At local levels, as capitalists have turned to appropriating public properties through privatization or brute force, the people are fighting back. When private interests recently attempted to fence off a public park in the rich enclave of San Juan’s Condado district, an outdoors recreation space used by the neighboring working-class community, the community came together and took down the fence. Meanwhile, more people are expressing their anger and indignation in public meetings or private corporate affairs, speaking their mind through social media, and through music, art, film, theater, and other forms. For example, musical artists like Residente and Bad Bunny are playing revolutionary roles,raising consciousness and agitating. (To see a video example, click link: https://youtu.be/GK87AKIPyZY)
The current colonial government and local ruling class are now facing the consequences – not only of the natural disaster, but also of the far more destructive onslaught of an economic and social system enriching and empowering the rulers at the expense of the masses who have felt in their flesh the erosion of basic life supports. The result has been political polarization, such as between the neofascist and fundamentalist religious groups supporting the ruling class and the growing popular resentment and outpourings of action against rigged, corrupt politics and the attack on people’s rights.
REVOLUTIONARY INTERDEPENDENCE
In this environment, Hurricane Fiona may have also brought the perfect social storm, further inciting class and political confrontations. The reigning political parties are under growing criticism and are daily losing legitimacy in the face of the lack of electricity, water, food, and other necessities and growing rates of violence, suicide, mental illness, economic uncertainty and other unnatural disasters.
Most significant for revolutionaries today are the stirrings of a motion for the unity of the struggles in Puerto Rico, a critical stage there, here on the “Mainland,” and globally. For our mutual success, we need to learn from their experience and to forge alliances with revolutionaries there; they need the collaboration of forces in the imperialist “Mainland,” bedrock of the island’s exploitation and repression and of the power of local capitalists. The process to put an end to capitalist rule is interdependent.
Solidarity and united action are today emerging in Puerto Rico in an embryonic – though rapidly evolving – form. Yet, the opportunities may be short-lived if the neofascist solution being pushed by the ruling class gains support from sectors of the increasingly desperate masses. Our primary role now is to join the fight for class unity through propaganda, agitation and networking.
November/December 2022 vol.32. Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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