El Paso is a bellwether of the heightening crisis that is engulfing our society today. On August 3, an assassin armed with a weapon of war and a manifesto killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. That massacre was preceded by another in Gilroy, California only days before, and was followed only hours later by the mass killings in Dayton, Ohio. Then, on the first day of school in Mississippi, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided seven food processing plants and detained 680 Latino immigrant workers. Suddenly hundreds of children found themselves abandoned.
The ruling class cannot allow the working class to unite, so it calls up anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideology from the dark underbelly of American history, to divide the class against itself. Developed in order to justify slavery and then the horrific excesses of Jim Crow segregation, it is now trumpeted from the highest reaches of government. This is the social face of fascism today.
The response to these attacks has been overwhelming expressions and actions of unity. People lined up for blocks to give blood, many brought food, coming to the aid of their brothers and sisters from all across the country. These are all glimpses of the kind of unity required of our class if we are to move forward.
Demagogic anti-immigrant propaganda blames the immigrant for taking away jobs. All of the jobs are being taken away by rapidly advancing automation, along with a ruling class hell-bent upon keeping all of the wealth that society produces for itself alone. Those who were murdered in El Paso were from both sides of the border. A global new class calls for global class unity.
We live in a time of crisis. Production with robots permanently replaces wage-labor, throwing millions of workers outside of, and to the fringes of society. This is a new class, necessarily set upon a path to secure the necessities of life, and to secure a future where distribution is based on need, and not with money.
This new class is under attack. The ruling class is first waging economic warfare against the very class already impoverished by the crisis in the economy. As the crisis grows exponentially, a growing equality of poverty grows along with it.
El Paso illuminates both the cause and the solution to the crisis of our time. Class unity is the condition of the emancipation of our class.
