Puerto Rican Workers Show the Way!
Rosselló Forced Out:
Puerto Rican Workers Show the Way!
Cancel the Debt! For the Independence of Puerto Rico!
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
During a grim time of social reaction with the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and the marshalling of layers of the frenzied petty-bourgeoisie and layers of the labor aristocracy for Trump’s fascistic “send them back” rallies, Puerto Rican workers have illuminated the path forward. Through mass protests and general strike actions, Puerto Rican workers forced corrupt New progressive Party (PNP, the statehood party) Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign. Workers, women and youth had had enough of the Rosselló regime after the corruption scandal and the “RickyLeaks” Telegram (app) chats between members of his administration surfaced. These misogynistic and homophobic chats that bragged about their corruption also mocked the victims of Hurricane Maria which devastated the island. The comprador bourgeoisie in the colonial and semi-colonial world adopt class prejudices of their imperialist masters.
What started out as demonstrations in the streets, culminated in over a dozen unions calling for a general strike on July 22nd that shut down businesses, three of the largest universities, arriving cruise ships in San Juan and the major arterial highway. It is significant that workers entered the fray as an organized, conscious opposition. There were also organized protests in the United States, but labor strike actions were absent. When labor leaders in the United States mainland heard there was a general strike on they had to look it up in the dictionary!
Puerto Rican workers have a history of militancy and high class consciousness. An exploited actual colony of the United States, there are more than 5 million Puerto Ricans residing in the U.S., with a high concentration in New York City, the finance capital of U.S. imperialism. The U.S. residents outnumber the 3.2 million that reside on Puerto Rico itself, and form a strategic bridge between the U.S. working class and the workers of Puerto Rico. Treated as second-class citizens, island residents cannot vote in the Presidential elections and qualify for limited social benefits despite paying into Social Security; they have one non-voting delegate in the U.S. Congress. Puerto Rico is a colony whose rights begin and end with the imperialist U.S. Congress. We say “No second-class workers! Build a class struggle fight for full citizenship and employment rights for all workers, migrant or native-born!”
As we said in Class War in January, 2018…
“So far, during the entirety of the 21st century, Wall Street hedge fund managers have been robbing the country, enslaving the population by saddling them with impossible compounding interest based debts (~$12k per inhabitant). The staggering PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) enforces an austerity regime to wring the payments ($70B) out of the island’s life. Already plagued with a 45% poverty rate and 12.4% unemployment, insufficient infrastructure, damaged for profit healthcare and environmental contamination from military and industry, then global warming went to work this year with a vengeance. After two hurricanes smashed the island most of the way back to a 19th century existence, Donald Trump flew in, tossed rolls of paper towels at the locals and congratulated the federal emergency suits who were busy partying in San Juan. Four months later and the power is not restored to 40% of the population, with many who have service not on the grid at all, but surviving with generator power.”
Trump continues a barrage of tweet lies about how hurricane debt relief was “wasted.” Even NBC corporate media cannot hide his lies about how much was voted and how much has been delivered:
“President Donald Trump falsely claimed in a pair of tweets Thursday that Congress had “foolishly” sent $92 billion of aid money to Puerto Rico, which “squandered away or wasted” much of it.
Congress has allocated $42.5 billion to disaster relief for Puerto Rico, according to federal data, but the island had received less than $14 billion through May. Trump signed another aid bill in June that will send an additional $1 billion to the island. The bulk of aid dollars is still in Washington, much of it waiting on processes that require officials to submit a series of plans outlining how they expect to use the money and await federal approval.”
The real situation of Puerto Rican workers is that of an already impoverished class having to cope post-Maria with survival on depressed wages and an official unemployment rate of 8%. The PRE-MARIA data already showed a staggering picture…,
“Puerto Rico’s median household income is just under 32 percent — less than one third — of the national average of $61,372. The state with the lowest household median income in 2017 was West Virginia, at $43,469. Median household income in Puerto Rico is less than half of the median household income in the poorest states in the Union: West Virginia and Mississippi.” – “Census Bureau Reports Household Income Rising in States, Dropping in Puerto Rico”, Puerto Rico Report
Trump, the Drive Towards Fascism & Brutal Colonial/Semi-Colonial Exploitation
The fates of the Puerto Rican working masses and the mainland U.S. working class are intertwined. If the effect of social reaction in the mainland U.S. is bad, it is multiplied many times over for colonial Puerto Rico. Through Trump’s anti-immigrant tweets and racist rants at his rallies, the bourgeoisie are laying the foundation for a mass fascist movement to crush all opposition to their drive to restore their falling rate of profit. Gone are the Dodd-Frank protections against the fictitious profits schemes that tanked the economy in 2008, and Capital now believes it can recover this profit rate through attacks at home and super-profit exploitation abroad. So if today it is lone white supremacists terrorizing and murdering people of color, tomorrow it will be mass fascist gangs on the street carrying out their genocidal program against people of color, immigrants, the trade unions and the whole working class.
Liberals are enthralled by the “rapid” responses of the police to lone fascist gunmen. They can scarcely do otherwise while they swear the problem is guns in the hands of civilians. We hear the same from conciliators on the left, both “socialists” and anarchists, as they fight against both the Leninist party concept AND the class-independent, fighting workers’ Labor Party. But the anti-Leninists, in the main, are committed body and soul to perpetual collaboration and coalition with the ”progressive” wing of bourgeois politics, who are themselves attached at the hip to the “constitutional” fascists’ defenders and apologists in elected office. In concrete how this works is the left in retreat and even anarchists join the DSA as the left alternative while the DSA folds up street action and labor union organizing (as if this was ever their forte) and commits to Bernie, who said he would support whichever Democrat wins the Primaries. This is how the reformists run from outfits like the collapsing ISO right into the hip pocket of the bourgeoisie along with some stray anarchists who think it is fine to set up shop as an anarchist caucus in the DSA or the Greens, styling their activity as “damage control.”
On this road they are eschewing the entire historic workers’ battle against fascism. As Trotsky put it, they are playing in the “shadow of the Popular Front” and supporting the DSA instead of organizing workers’ forces to defeat the fascists in the streets!! Much like Henry Ford they seem to say ‘history is bunk.’
And if this was not bad enough before, we have a president who is the inspiration-in-chief for what the FBI calls “stochastic terrorism,” the white supremacy volunteers. So in New Jersey it is not the fascists who are banned as “terrorists” but “AntiFa.” So when the right puts out fake reports of an AntiFa ‘border resistance’ campaign centered on El Paso, Texas, the Lieutenant Governor grabs for headlines after the mass shooting at WalMart and warns AntiFa to stay out of El Paso and out of Texas. Liberals, centrists and the DSA want to commit you to never-ending dialogue (buried inside the Democratic Party) with this kind of obvious class enemy pol!
Worse yet are the “leftists” who defend the police, calling them workers out of one side of their mouth as they praise “the masses” out the other side and troll the idea of a social vanguard. When the police attack the actual masses in the streets of Puerto Rico, just as they do in Moscow and Hong Kong, the practical self-defense of the actual masses is nowhere in the plans of these middle class muddleheads!
Happily, Puerto Rico has its own traditions, as we have just witnessed. “La Junta pa’ Carajo!” Taking the example of the Puerto Rican struggle, united class struggle of the mainland U.S. workers and the Puerto Rican working class against Trump and the whole capitalist system would go a long way towards fighting the attacks on the entire working class. Trump can go the way of Rosselló, and THIS YEAR!
For Workers Revolution Throughout the Americas!
As we wrote in “We call for independence for Puerto Rico.” (Class War Volume 3, Number 2, January 2018):
“It is in the interest of the U.S. working class to defend Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination and to support the independence movement. It is the duty of the vanguard workers to explain how there is no progressive capitalist path out of the crisis and that only a socialist Puerto Rico united in a Socialist Federation of Caribbean nations can break free from exploitation by imperialism. Who will cancel the debt? What party can deliver jobs for all, education, an environmental clean-up and quality socialized healthcare? Puerto Rico needs its own revolutionary workers party, a Puerto Rican section of the new world party of Socialist Revolution required to save the human species from proxy and inter-imperialist wars, pollution and starvation. What does U.S. democracy have to offer its colonies? Representatives that can’t vote and Governors that can’t govern. In discussions leading up to his formulation of the Transitional Program, Trotsky questioned whether even the U.S. ruling class could afford bourgeois democracy.
Then as now the answer was no democracy so far as Puerto Rico is concerned, and thus we raise the call for the organization of Workers Councils and a national congress of them to decide every matter of Puerto Rican national life. To deliver all political power to the workers councils’ government, a nationwide workers militia needs to be formed, with training provided by veterans and leaders elected by the worker ranks.”
Down with PROMESA and the Fiscal Control Board (FCB)! Smash the hedge funds–Cancel the debt!
Remedial Reparations! Billions in Federal Dollars for restoration now!
Puerto Ricans must decide their own national fate!
Repeal the “Compact of Permanent Union”!
U.S. Military and Federal Police off the island!
Down with the Wal-Martization of the economy! For workers councils and a workers self-managed, planned development!
For a national congress of workers councils! For workers control of wages and prices! Build unions and factory/shop floor and neighborhood wage and price committees!
Jobs for All! 30 hours work for forty hours pay!
Free quality education and health care for all! Nationalize the super-exploiter bosses, big pharma, big oil, big box without compensation and under workers’ control!
For a revolutionary workers party based upon the program and method of Trotsky’s Transitional Program! For a new workers international! For united class struggle across the Caribbean, throughout the Americas!
For a Puerto Rican workers and farmers government! For a Socialist Federation of the Caribbean! For world socialism!
- CWG-USA, 08/04/2019
