Solidarity With Murdered Workers in Mayfield and Edwardsville
Cincinnati Socialists mourn the human lives lost in the recent outbreak of tornadoes in the US Midwest and Upper South. We express special outrage at the loss of working-class lives at the Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois and the Mayfield Consumer Products plant in Mayfield, Kentucky. In both of these facilities, workers were prevented by management from evacuating their workplaces, and the facilities were themselves inadequately prepared for sheltering workers during catastrophic weather.
We insist that these workers were victims of outright murder by capitalism. In 1845, German political theorist and revolutionary Friedrich Engels wrote that
when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.
As Engels pointed out, to slaughter men and women for private gain is universally considered murder. Marxism teaches us that the capitalist mode of production inevitably leads to police violence and imperialist warfare; it also shows that capitalist production itself is violent. Inasmuch as it subsumes human life to the discipline of the factory floor and the time-clock, capitalism—even at its most benign—makes life into an enforced unfreedom. We cannot both keep our jobs and make and live our lives freely, and we cannot survive if we cannot keep our jobs. At best, under capitalism, we live as full human beings only in the spatial and temporal interstices of capital. The Edwardsville and Mayfield slaughter shows that when we are at work, we are not only not free, but we are deprived of the basic right to preserve our own lives.
The workers of Edwardsville and Mayfield were of many races, genders, and nationalities. The vicious discipline of capitalist production knows no boundaries. It is established everywhere by violence, and everywhere it wields its violence against men and women, native and immigrant, white and Black, rural and urban, able-bodied and disabled. In the case of the Mayfield factory, however, it must be pointed out that many of the workers were migrants from Puerto Rico and others were incarcerated at Graves County Jail and Calloway County Jail. Many of these workers, in other words, were not only brought together on the shop floor to serve as means to capital’s ends, but were members of communities affected by direct state violence at home and abroad. Therefore, we point out that capitalism is always and everywhere a seamless garment of barbarism and cruelty. It is degrading and immiserating from Alpha to Omega. It cannot be repaired by piecemeal reforms; it must be abolished by the revolutionary action of the entire international working class.
Cincinnati Socialists call for a massive and collective show of solidarity with the people of Mayfield and Edwardsville. We call for public and militant support for labor organizing in all places. We call for the punishment of the capitalist owners of Mayfield Consumer Products and Amazon. Finally, we urge all people in Northern Kentucky and Southern Illinois to give serious consideration to joining a socialist, communist, or Marxist organization. We can never trust the capitalist state, and still less the ruling class itself, to defend us. We ourselves must be the political force that breaks the chains of capitalist oppression, immiseration, and savagery. Workers of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.